Foolish virgins, cruel wolves, Shiites, and Hebrews, each living the dream.

Exhorting the foolish virgins among them to take hold of and aim their gentleness, as of a powerful weapon, to wit that they have what is wanted and could do with it as only they chose: not what was asked, demanded or traded away.

Extorting the cruelest wolves to use their own gentleness, relinquish hold of their most powerful weapons in their own inborn cruel instincts, to wit that they have what they wanted, thus far, and could do with it as only they chose: not what was asked, demanded or traded away.

Exhaling cruelty, foolishness, and, oddly enough, gentleness, the most powerful weapons of their person in hold, to wit, the thoroughfare asked not, doled what it thought fit, thus far behind in the popular discourse, with only the spirit gum of what they could trade putting them to the right.

Taken to honoring and satiating himself to an amazing degree, with the most flummoxing aspect being the ridiculous deception that i had any hand in it whatsoever, thanks to whatever character flaws of mine, past indecencies, what-not. Were i the despicable sort he pretended me to be, id have ripped his throat long ago, instead of looking at tattered remnants of old wanted posters from a crime long since redressed--that, perhaps, is ironically a difference in opinion.

Taken to degrees of satiation in want of learning the better points of honor, with the most flummoxing aspect that his own character flaws were a ridiculous deception, to the discredit of wherever he lay his hands. Past indecencies, what-not. Pretending me to be a despicable sort, he had imagined wanted posters of the man, myself, poised to rip out his throat, redressing his crime as an ironic footnote, tattered remnant of what he pretended to be.

Taken to pretending, satiating the imagination, the tatters of his own past imaginings float upon the cranial fluid like what-not; what if his character flaws were only a ridiculous deception? What if the man who ripped out his throat were only a daydream, to the discredit of his imagination, and the wanted poster was only pointing-out crimes that had been forgiven in society during a more civilized epoch?

It was said today, of sin: no, no sin, harm to others, taken beyond karma, waiting for God to use a flaming sword? but to have man trade evil for evil, evil for evil, as of the Bible, or its Sharia cousin, where the Bible says in the New Testament with Paul and Christ himself saying not to trade evil-for-evil, forgive seventy times seven times. To wit, it becomes clear they could shed their American values like a ratty overcoat whenever they wanted, yell Old Testament or Koran things, and put that ratty overcoat back on when they lamented the loss of pennies. 

Evil-for-evil was/is the Jews and Shiite Muslims?

We're a nation of laws, Sherita, not ill feelings. 

Shemika says I have potential.

As Paul also said, beware of the ravenous among your group, for it might come to be that you yourself become devoured.

The flaw in man-directed Karma is such that, though it seem nice and communist, Jew, Muslim, one soon realizes it is not he who decides what among his acts are "bad", but the arbiters of punishment.

And then it gets good, when the pack of wolves break solidarity and begin devouring one another.

Remonstrance of characters of the age.

Having my own "data analysis firm" and sitting in a pool with 220 candidates for single positions on the internet; this consolidation reeks inflation by unemployment, death by lack of use, frustration by misuse, and the funneled non-sense of careers where so many merely had jobs, and nothing so illustrious as a career. Only those setting policy seemed to have any semblance of "job security", as it rain their piss across a disillusioned non-participating populace, "plumber" their friends(the policy makers) had said--a million defaulted student loans could become entry-level plumbing apprentice positions.

Woken to find my socks off my feet, those sitting part way up, past my ankles.  Some friendly ghost had undressed my feet and left me partially nude in the night, and I had those same puzzle-solving dreams, problem-solving dreams, my mind working out solutions to unreal problems, my mind, my mind, even in slumber trying to pitch-in, dreams in disquietude where the helter skelter dreamscape was most disquieting was not disheartening in how it appeared, but in how it really was.

And "Woke" being misappropriated by popular culture.  I think of Shane, living by the popular dollar, and conversely, obversely, dying by the popular dollar the way Glenn did; it can happen, as so many put their lives on a thread.  I thought myself perhaps lucky to be outside of the "cash and carry" economy, but time and circumstance happeneth to them all, and the rain just and unjust alike, times and seasons, as above so, vanity being vanity and vanity being carried on the wind.

1) (February 1, 2023) I still have a recollection of the shape of her bosom in that red silken shirt; she came to see me later, and it went not well, with not to much exchanged between.  I see her perhaps to a degree, still, as my own game of Simon, to push her buttons and sequentially react to this or that, action and reaction, flaming toothpaste volcano of love and sexually urgency, our timidities pounding in our youngling stupid ears, our plight still, even in the secret moments: only what someone else gave us.

2) (February 1, 2023) A man convinced, from his mountaintop, from his own promenade, from his own view of the countryside, that he had certainly lost something, a thing that he never really had anyway.  He missed it, and he wrote a cycle of best-selling books about it, getting a publisher firmly behind him with their marketing dollars, and an agent, feet on the desk, spouting ideas for his remonstrance.

3) (February 1, 2023) I had took to the Evening Post, the fortnightly, and found that Mrs Hearst's vagina was still as young and vital as ever.  "May it always be so" I was saying, my mind trying to overwrite that with the thought, "somebody else's problem".

4) (May 1, 2023) I had looked to the skies and prayed for rain(headful of ideas that are driving me insane), and I had roundly shook out the sifter, separated the real gold dust from the impotent sands.

5) (February 1, 2023) A rotund little jiggle-billy at the mercy of the Sanctions Monkeys, continually penalized when the prospect of pressure clearly doesn't outweigh the perceived danger; somewhere in that, they make high finance, monies, and hostile nations partner-up in the light of walls of red-tape and speeches that were well-paid for.  All the while their hope is not peace, perhaps, but to pay car payments, and that is what the system gave us--an endless cycle of words and punishments for words, stipends for bureaucrats.

Can a man lose that which he never had anyway?

Some threats have no teeth, as it were, and men a world away from the action cannot put their words at the scene reliably and with certitude of forethought, because they have put nothing to the fear of a loss, nothing on the table, no skin in the game, and only the endless selling of their words....

strangled by yards of sentence surrounding like crime scene tape, something of a Mary Collinsworth sweet ripening party, while her own dying body was about to grow ripe, raped and "mine" carved into her neck.

How teeth are loosened and made so inconsequential, a veritable lack of teeth for the one that had misspent the day chewing on assflesh, when the day was a resource for joy and happiness. And were the two the same thing, anyway? Same drawbridge, same toll.

Matt Dillon would scour the territories for miners, perhaps, strays, dry-gulchers, panners that may have had the nagging little precipitate to bring it off horrorshow.  Remember Grandma was horny all those years for Pernell Roberts, and in her later years, the edge blunted of her sanity, she would full admit the truth in any company whatsoever, as if it were as plain a fact, her thing for Adam Cartwright: Adam Cartwright and her thing. Being a thing, the two combined: two things.

"should'a been dead on a Sunday morning in my head...."

The raw novelty of the thing was that it had to be intricately documented, the finery of the thing recorded for posterity, to be stored in libraries, searched over years later, and published in numerous histories in the far reaches of the future.  I was just saying that I was looking at the window, not even looking out the window, but just sort of staring at the thing itself, you know, a kind of landmark of a point in time it was, and I remember at that time, Pernell Roberts wasn't being beamed around the satellites; there were fewer then, and military grade GPS hadn't been made available to the public.

Pernell Roberts would have poured-over the thing as if it were a job, but it really being just a hobby, that he took any task, however it was, as it were of a kind of monolithic importance.  I gave no permanence to the moment I was talking about, kind of floating along the timeline like the little ghost in Mario Brothers, kind of strolling about in some gigantic highway to the seaside in Alexandria, Egypt, kind of wandering.

Not lost, per se, but wandering, as was said, "not all who wander are lost".  But I might be simultaneously, and distinctively in both states, "lost" and "wandering" in perhaps senses that are unrelated, disparate states of being at once, as of having two feet for which to bestride two provinces at once, in the selfsame moment.

Of Mary's ripening, a kind of hydrosis, or something, a layer of water between her person proper and the skin section, the rind covering of her person, a kind of artificial weight induction, something of a stymie of the body mass index, Mary would begin to smell, and perhaps even draw flies.  They would need mentholatum to get near her, that or some other kind of thing, the kind of Febreze that nices up a corpse, and all the well, Matt Dillon's determined chin.

Set the Comanche and Festus to abide at the Landmark Inn while the old marshal, the big old slow-talking farmboy, pitched spleen and his bowlegged stance at whomever come wrong on the thing; a convertible sedan near the woods, and all, a kind of existential "up yours" to the whole thing, watching the west die the death of the CCCP, spending its way into oblivion, a la the end of the Cold War, but a revenge visited on the West, an honest tab of just desserts with the entry wound shaped like the tip of his own weapon.

A private army of desperate welfare moms taking on professional military combatants, and, held in reserve, an all girl army that "knows Kung Fu". We're all full of ideas.

Strange thoughts assail on a Sunday night on the edge of the big woods.  Partial memories, some, co-mingled with other things, and even the sound of two different televisions contorting two different types of shows, not just two shows, but two different type of shows, ye dig?  Meanwhile, a stereo system adding a third voice, four memories, all that noise, and an Oprah quote about depression, she called it a loss of self, essentially, and she didn't much put note to it, but let the participants do both the writing and the underlining, as was her brilliant sort of way, to let them try to bring it off, because they knew their own terrain best.

A kind of doldrum in between all of that, the different sub-currents and strifes and strains of the things, and what was that--4 things, 3 sound streams, and an Oprah quote.  It was something of depression in some of the things, and somehow we even dragged in the Marshall from Dodge City, and all that, and it became as it were, greater in sum than any particular piece in and of itself put to scrutiny.

We have, as it were, a coalition of trained zombies, gun-toting, facing-off against that army of desperate welfare moms(if they don't fight, they dont get SNAP benefits), meanwhile we've transposed Adam Cartwright into Gunsmoke, and somehow, Miss Kitty is a ho, and my granny is a ho in her old age, and everybody is sort of broached of character and integrity, and the only true zombies, the zombies themselves, and Adam and Matt, for all their wooden expressions.

You would turn a cross on its side in the middle of such a skirmish, and strap Miss Kitty to that, after a brief torture session to soften her, and then light fires around Dodge.  Festus and the Comanche, back from the Landmark Inn, drinking Sasparilla and smoking two Commandante cigars.

Doldrums and Tradewinds and Horse Latitudes and so forth, none of which explained the conviction that maybe there was something amiss in that old memory of mine, something more amiss than the soup of demented television commentary from my familiars, the conviction that it was the onset of some kind of feeling; they had said so much of becoming a teenager.  They said as much about becoming an old fart, too.

Far more jarring as it were, to transpose the old Western show characters as if they were entirely interchangeable, but then Oprah and 90's Top 40 songs, an 80s Brat Pack comedy and a staid news show.

We could self-righteously call Miss Kitty a ho, but we have to at least, and its not even condescending from our seat on heavenly clouds, agree that she certainly was a pimp, a mistress, a madam, a lady of the evening.  Fret none, there is no pearl in her clamshell, and the forthright and upstanding slow-talking local constabulary will not stoop to marry her--the pretense of making one honest.

5) (February 1, 2023) He was watching me as I worked at the desk, making my calendar.  I was digging through Google Docs and help pages, trying to find something, an advisory on how to actually sell a Google Calendar file, if there could be such a thing, to sell access to a super calendar.  I was working at it, pulling at it with both hands, and at the end, a little flotsam of my shame.

We had our differences, but what made it all worthwhile, set a hue to the prism, was our similarities, and that little smile almost put lead back into my pencil, where all the lead had squirted out just moments prior.  Hell, it was sweet icing for his little Waffle Fries.

"You like my itinerary?"

"It has a certain caveman dignity--a monolithic kind of sense about it."

I got under my caveman blanket in the other room and ruminated, I put it through a kind of interpretive matrix of things about OBGYN concerns and schedule maintenance, and tannery and all sorts of other, even the Zodiac somewhere.

Would he try to kill me?

I was just, as it were, making a calendar, a list of dates and references about various things, even the Zodiac, and he was, Parnassus, the wall at the corner of the town, a fringe kind of barrier between thee and me, and I had to push right through him, stick it through his middle.

"On this date in history..."

The debut of the Edsel.

The shuttering of hundreds of Blockbuster stores.

Reggie Jackson broke the home-run barrier.

But to make a Google Calendar, sell access to that, access URL given via email, and the thing encompassing various subjects and philiars of daily life, across minutia and other things, birthdays, deathdays, monumental reason du'tre of society, various national days and days from other nations, so that the things is relevant across the spectrum, across the world, wherever the little Google fingers reach down from the sky to touch a person.

6) (February 6, 2026) She is scared sh*tless of me.  And I was laying there, one knee pulled up: it had my ass cheeks kind of opened up, where when I broke wind, it sounded like that whisper of butterfly language, and so many people could be offended by the surly speech of a butterfly, even think I hated Mariah Carey, which I don't, but that I had a problem with somebody, and I was projecting my own contradiction and fallacies onto the innocent person of George Russell, that no one ever died from ill-intent or anything, but I was the little impetus mixing in the water like powdered electrolytes, and if I brought it off, the entire remainder of the empire would slide off a cliff.

Even as I pushed her onto the third rail, it was never outwardly markable that she was scared of me(February 1, 2023). Never was(May 1, 2023).

But what I had run up the pole, run it right up there, was an impossible idea to share a calendar amongst some hundreds or thousands of strangers, kind of viral thing amonst the populace, a death code matriculating in various communities, percolating and evolving, baking like bread, making, and thats what it was, making, like the yeast rising the dough, and then George Rousseau's eyebrow went up one millimeter, and I was left alone in the room, no calendar file made, and only a fart smell to prove the moments had elapsed.

They are really nibbling away at the population totals, aren't they?  3 here, 12 there, 6 over yonder.

That sh*t adds up.

Who's gonna watch Avatar 2 if yall keep shooting everybody?

I wonder and mayhap, I am a wonder.

God said, "I am."  And further, "I am that I am."  "I am the great I am".

Talking theology wise of the pursuit of knowledge, on the ministry page, i think there is a contramanding tendency at self condemnation and knowledge for impure ends: it reeks of original sin, where some pursuit of knowledge is that terminator, that remote edge between day and night, the tug of war between wonder and the unholy side of knowledge--not unethical against laws, but unjust and unfit for man existentially, such as the world-destroying paradox created in California, Woodlow Park, fusion, fission, a'fishin' and a con'fusion underwritten in the pursuit of a perpetual, inexhaustable resource.

Of this, it too, I suppose is a wonder.

7) (February 1, 2023) Franz Tost was building a fire pit behind his property, at the rear, in relative seclusion, security, and presumed privacy, a fire pit for pulled pork, pizzas, and all sorts of fun food fodder.  I peed near the base of the thing, slinging little sand flecks against the masonry, but he could but love me even still for my loose ways.

That fleck of sand was as my life at the root of eternity, how it figured in the beginning, and how the adjusted balance will later figure, less than one of 66000 words that describe but one solitary funklequarry, not even an insignificant ankle or wrist piece, less than that, but dignified, nevertheless, a "unique", like a horrid busted tooth singing along.

I am a wonder, I wonder if the quiddity of so much, and the quiddities of so much reflect me back into the spectrum, part of like a broad class portrait, and that too is a wonder, not to catch the enormity of the perspective. Horatio Alger, downcast, suggests slightly that I invented my own wonder, and that the immensity of it was too, my own invention, as if it were not naturally occurring, just as Eden was between the rivers, so too, this magnitude was between dueling perceptions.

The boundaries of the friend's perceptions perhaps lacked proper solidity, which put him insecure defensively, but the question persisted, and eventually he would take up the subject, if only perfunctory at the start.  The subject would become, as it were, as if his own, for him to tell for every available ear, in his own good time, in his own jello bowl of stars. And I would, at intervals, look up from reading Dr Cornell West's book, only so that I could see if the flap was sputtering, yet.

8) (May 1, 2023) I had chitlins' in an old toilet in the edge of the woods, in the bowl. Still steaming, guts still screaming, all the unsatiated dreamin'.

between the lips, down the throat, and in its time, exiting through that sweet donut dispenser

"They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface.  This is no easy task.  But whether easy or not, herein will lie the difference between them and every other legislator--they will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface.

They will be very right, he said.

Having effected this, they will proceed to trace an outline of the constitution?

No doubt.

And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn their eyes upward and downward: I mean that they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God.

Very true, he said.

And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God?

Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture."

Plato, The Republic

They were sitting as it were, in an AMC location, watching some TMNT(with that Paige, Casey, Master Splinter, Shredder, et al) or some such other of that nature, and all of the real world they were aware of was the shadow of their own heads on the bottom of the screen, that of himself and his peers, and those were the only elements of the world proper that encroached, elseways it ways that dreamtime held sway over all.

It was as it were, top-up bottom-down ideology, people that kicked against anything of organization, except for the one company in Middenorftino, anything of the usual kind that reeked of efficiency or was abundantly common, but they could be lulled by the muses, and beauty spoke many a dialect into even the most ignorant of ears.

"You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows..."

Plato, The Republic

You either carry over a to-do list from the next day, or make that to-do list the night before. I love hitting my Google Calendar the night before. It reinforces a sense of structure. But don't forget too, to include "whitespace" for brainstorming and inspiration. Mind inspiration isn't idle time, because a lot of that will come when you're busy, but make time to chase those leads, which is what inspiration is: a nexus of leads.

So she had been the world's oldest person at the ripe-old age of 118.  Now the oldest person is 117, and probably has a new goal for her life, that being to equal 118(her birthday is in March) or eclipse that.

Sour, sour mood this morning, a deflation of my usual optimism.  Thinking of my books, and how its sort of given to some that if you write a book, people would eventually read it. I published in 2013 and made, over the course of five years or so, the princely sum of about 4 dollars, during the whole time.

But think of that so regal self-absorbed optimistic/narcisistic assumption, like if you write a book, someone's gonna read it. I've disproven that, but I kinda got cursed on my efforts, with my father saying I would be the worst-selling author of all time.

Seems like so much of this stuff is just a gloriously crazy waste of time.

Maybe I'm trying to say, if I'm gonna live a long time, I gotta stop worrying about this stupid shit, stupid shit like this that does me not one iota of good--never has.

"Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite another part in the cosmic scheme.  And on this apparently unimportant speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief.  Love, with it unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain; all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life and death.  It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth.  And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in comparison with its population--are able to hear.  The music of a more inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it.  Those who hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of life and death."

-Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today.

Quite as it were, though the spirit be the same as it ever was, we begin more and more to craft and customize the world around us, and some, as it were, propelled by forces beyond our comprehension, to "mingle the eternal and temporal".  Of which, no one has of yet plumbed the spiritual depths of Special Relativity, nor probed much of the nature of this little burgh of ants.

Of life and the human condition, there is not so much more than the material for which to quench us, to set onto our flaming bodies and starving minds.  But our minds starve still, as is the searching nature of man, the Original Sin, which may be caste in the same bag as the Desire To Know, for assuredly, man would open a Pandora's Box, time and again, just to see or experience what happened.  This was Schroedinger's Cat, that Uncertainty Principle, telling us that we just cannot keep away and keep our fingers out of that large existential pie, consequences be damned, forgotten and given no warrant.

"He has a craving which nothing in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to satisfy; a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is possible to him."

-Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today.

stepped into the world as one sipping from a cup? but nevertheless, a transitory sort of bird, coagulating between two junctures, at a pace, a happenstance plopped-down and push-pinned between several more determinate points.

It was Friday morning.

I un-knotted my colon, lost in thought in the outside air, to be sustained by pure clean air, and have those as it were, influence my thoughts; I was somewhere between Stunt Driver Gimble and Henry David Thoreau, with probably more Stunt Driver Gimble in my colon than without.

I was thinking as such that all news was not about the President, and I turned away to better my perspective, as I was not paid to generate content for a network, not fill so many hours a day with pointed perspectives for or against; I had the luxury to reserve my own judgement, as it were.

One could pay dearly for independence of mind, so to speak, in the modern age, particularly if he sought for it in the wrong corners, for indeed, it is not found without very often, but more or less consistently indwelling, sitting in between the ears, all the time.  Indeed, so much of that outside must be cast aside and did away with in order to actually mark a moment of silence, to not be plugged-in or reachable by the touch of a button.

They used to experiment on small animals by inducing stimuli at the touch of a button.

I was watching a program on the Akashic Record earlier, something of the mysticism, a sort of global consciousness that more learned men have hinted it, things like the collective unconscious, a kind of spiral symmetry prevailing across the human beans in the ether, how they all seem to approach and sense and theorize and then, even when it is unexpected, there are more than one set of hands to be found grasping for that new, novel, original thing.

Synchronicity.

Or, as Blake said darkly, "the Fearful Symmetry".  It was something only one with extra senses could pull off, to mine his thoughts from a few indefinite yet tantalizing words, and then, to find, enigmatically so, that it was not a new thought, but the pattern, the shadow of one's own prior thoughts, that Deja Vu that fingered insistently through the darkness of time and space to encapsulate and snapshot some un-bespoken moment in time in the reader's own life, even some 4 centuries later.

Indeed of the unseen transmissions, of the Akashic Record, Tesla said to know too much or much more in a given time than anyone, to seem to have advanced knowledge, to even do "wireless electricity", and him being one of the pooka, one of the touched of the Akashic Record?  Was his symmetry fearful, locked in patent wars with Thomas Edison?

I had caffeinated sweet beverages, and set down my "f*ck-all", and generally adjusting the bolts in my neck my looking at my own little space, the mindset, the attic of the old asylum, as it were, I finally had some unabbreviated television time.  My "f*ck-all" sat, like Matt Dillon's 45, for a few hours as I gathered-up my spleen, my unction, got a snoot-full of who I am, who the ancient Isrealites were, and then I found myself finishing the guy on tv's sentences, finishing the thought, as it were, going further ahead in his sermon notes for the greater truth of the piece, what they call "the Bridge of Interpretation" in hermeneutics.

Of that a "breach in the wall", which I had plugged with Kevin's sunburnt ginger hindparts, how he was there and not there at once, and there was such burned with fire, the Temple damaged, and such and so forth.  Even that, as Solomon would have said, had its time and place, and even the reign of an Anti-Christ according the St John would have its own marked time and place, and somewhere in all that hatred and killing and territorialism, I checked the tag on my underwear, and it amazingly had my name on it.  I remember that guy.

Adrien Brody.

I remembered talking about Specific Gravity, or saying that mass and the pull of the curvature of spacetime: voids abhoring, vacuums calling like unto like, and all that, and all the substance of the universe singing various portions, ala String Theory, of the self-same song of amazement, wonder, and all that, set to the rhythm of life and death, and marked by the drip-drop of the perception of time.

It was such to say, "gravitational forces are abundantly self-evident, inductive."

As the bark said, "aim for the butt and do what feels right."

 

hailstorm of the very vices of necessity.

"The author of the Political Justice took abstract reason for the rule of conduct, and abstract good for its end.  He places the human mind on an elevation, from which it commands a view of the whole line of moral consequences; and requires it to conform its acts to the larger and more enlightened conscience which it has thus acquired.  He absolves man from the gross and narrow ties of sense, custom, authority, private and local attachment, in order that he may devote himself to the boundless pursuit of universal benevolence.  Mr Godwin gives no quarter to the amiable weaknesses of our nature, nor does he stoop to avail himself of the supplementary aids of an imperfect virtue.  Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good, and the dictates of inflexible justice, which is the "law of laws and sovereign of sovereigns".  All minor considerations yield, in his system to the stern sense of duty, as they do, in the ordinary and established ones, to the voice of necessity."

-William Hazlitt on William Godwin.

It is not complimentary to the masses that they are so easily led, but we are not interested in praising or blaming; we are concerned for truth, and the truth is that for better or for worse religious people follow leaders. A good man may change the moral complexion of a whole nation; or a corrupt and worldly clergy may lead a nation into bondage....  -AW Tozer 

Why, we didnt need sociology or HR; we needed anthropology.  We needed the symposium when we had chosen the ampitheater, and the stoa when we had chosen the cinema varete of streaming enigmatically prolific and abundant data--lifetimes of it.  It had come across that SQL remote pull sessions costed hundreds of dollars from disinterested third parties; they had free trial periods, but it was so off putting as to make one forget and yearn for the server-in-the-bathroom of yesteryear.

I wotted a kind of netherworld, a space of odd gravity pockets, where spoken words were not heard, they found no purchase, but the thunk word was far more substantive, it lived and breathed like a monster created in secret, but on the escape and quite frankly, running amok.

I had fallen in with an institute of higher learnings, talking of self-evident objective truths, self-evident good, and so forth, but they would spam me talking about various sins of Mrs Bacon, and the high virtues of Anne Hathaway, how MSNBC set out to renovate culture by uprooting the whole thing, a stripmining of objective good to encapsulate spores on the winds.  Indeed, I wondered how the organization line devolved and coalesced from outling Plato to soapboxing for political movements.

"He has a nice smile" but so do lawn gnomes.

Of that, I had hit on a line in Romans 15, about "receiving others as Christ received you".  I thought of the magnitude of that, how that went beyond even Christ's own words of loving others, this put it in perspective, Paul saying to use the standard of Christ.  Christ's love sacrificed for the good of others, not just being socially kind to people, but really getting in there, man, and doing a good turn above and beyond.

As Christ did?

He was even more than willing to lay down his own life.

What if all those ppl you knocked down fell into your pathway forward?

Remember, the universe cleans itself, and karma is a great wheel that will eventually make a full rotation: it will all come back around.

 

And if you won't be good to yourself, could you reasonably expect others to be good to you, in turn?

Like even, if pressed, some venison meatballs in the pasta sauce, and me, the American, getting told that there is in fact something of just pasta in pasta sauce, but then there's meat sauce.  And other stuff.

But again, not as I would, but as God would that I would do, for that which I would do, I should do not, and that which I kick against the pricks, was probably where I should be in the first place, without all the caterwauling.

Even the most unworkable dreams have a kind of pull, that magnetism that dreams have, where you can't wake up, and you might feel anxiety, but its like, in your own head, you're watching tv.  Of TV, during Gunsmoke I roused and lit one wondering what in the hades had happened the prior day, like I didn't know, but you know, unworkable dreams, and the salient saccharine daydreams of stuff that really won't happen, but you kinda would like that instead, and hell, I just don't know.

In any confrontation, there is either intimidation or inspiration.  You choose how you react: whether to cower or rise to the occasion.  We can become complacent in our dictums, and we become lazy, we can become slaves to our circumstances.  We can react with hostility, defensiveness, envy, and maybe even fear.

Do we regroup and come back better, or do we hide under the porch, my friends?  An orphan became the Emperor of most of the known world.  He said in his private journal that he retained the mindset to react to anything, not by whim or instinct, but reflectively, that he could choose how to react.

Our modern leadership guru wants us to be lions, but even the lion's great majesty is just an image, for the lion is a scavenger, an opportunist.  How much of that should we employ?

Certainly we should take advantage of circumstance, when our principles are observed. 

Should we lapse into complacency at the expense of core business?  Do we spend the work day dreaming of some turn of luck that affords the purchase of daydreams?

Neigh.  We work and dream, too, but we can't stop work to dream, nor can we afford to neglect our dreaming for work.

We might miss stray currents and less beneficial aspects by staying to the center.

Count the stars or drop shafts beneath the crust of the earth, we do, but understand mankind?

Why, it was otherwise, "as flies unto wanton boys are we to the gods"/this Bud's for you! and it was kind of a twiddle widdle play purdy kind of microwaving under a hard glare of pallid indifference, and for all it was, this humanity thing, a scholastic undertaking, but for breathing hard enough, a kind of puff of boredom, such that it could snap the wings right off a butterfly.

In my being birthed a proletariat, I but smelt the earth, time to time, at my fingers, poo on my shoes, cuticles bloody rosettes, and I came to prefer as it were, not to "taste the barrel", but to enjoy the grape, which meant to me I would have the more convenient single man's screw-on aluminum cap rather than the more effete cork.

 

 

Happy New Year. Hello 2023!

(from New Year's Day 2023)

"...sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one."  

-CS Lewis

Ah, another year, another opportunity to repeat the same mistakes, or an opportunity for the glorious quixotic pebble-toe half-nature of the impetus towards self-destruction and the love of pure noise and disturbance.

We claw through and breathlessly make our way to the exit sign on 2022, hoping for the first rays of dawn on January 1, 2023. We claw our way through and oftentimes to the pure meanness of staying alive, proving our veracity in simply not fading away, not burning out, proudly facing the throng in defiance, in defense of one's selfish ideals.

Another opportunity to get it right or go up in flames.

Another opportunity.

'Every new year is an uncharted and unknown sea. No ship has ever sailed this way before. The wisest of earth's sons and daughters cannot tell us what we may encounter on this journey. Familiarity with the past may afford us a general idea of what we may expect, but just where the rocks lie hidden beneath the surface or when that "tempestuous wind called Euroclydon" may sweep down upon us suddenly, no one can say with certainty.... '

-AW Tozer

Happy New Year!

Another.

But but but.... i made a New Year's resolution, and everything.  I decided to get started on a whole menu of positive, beneficial changes, like:

Only healthy food, and none of what tastes good.

Boring lovers that are stable in their moods, and probably b elong in a stable, regardless of their mood.

According to Lao Tse:

"Strength is controlling others.

Mastery is controlling one's own self."

But it was a New Year.

And I, feel cheated that all this mess in the New Year has that familiar reek to it, like a bad potato in the bag, of a soiled baby diaper somewhere hidden in the bottom of our garbage can.

But then i think, if i had gotten it right last year, I'd be prepared for new stuff this year, and it seems i'm not prepared for those newer reaches towards the ethereal, all the cavalcade of changes, completely unequal to the mark.

The gas hand in my truck. It had asked when Josef Bundren would have his 87th birthday, and I said I dunno, and the gas hand said he doesn't know either we could ask Hunter but sh*t let's fill the tank and get.

I was praying, hoping, petitioning God Himself that I would have enough gas in my truck yesterday to get back and forth to work.  On the way there, I was tying myself in knots, in my own thoughts, going back and forth on the matter, whether to just turn around, or press on.

All along the way, Hwy 9, the farmland in Dillon and Marlboro counties in South Carolina, part of the so-called "Cotton Trail", flat land, between the piedmont and the sea, very well-watered and fertile, great for growing cotton every year.

The fog was rising.

I was thinking: I could see the sun through the remnant of the fog, and thought, not the Sun but the Son.

Christ was the solar body, burning off the fog of sin and doubt, and metaphorically, fog can easily be equated to doubt, and more thinly to sin, an obscuring force between ourselves and Christ.

That fog was all the prior dead souls coming up, the dead souls and the doubts, dead souls rising into the air, vaporous, going to dissipate into thin air on the ascent to heaven.

Doubts dissipating, too.

Sin dissipating.

Every obscuring force between ourselves and the Lord coming to some sort of evaporation, leaving behind clarity.

A perfect clarity, just as perfect as the Perfect Law of Liberty, to rest in God's will.

For my own part, it was like God was telling me just to continue my drive to work, as planned.  Not that it had the endorsement of God, but maybe that it was better than the alternatives, it was, if not God's outright enumerated plan for me, then it was closer to His will than was turning around and going home.

Under the Perfect Law of Liberty, we look for the will of God to help guide us, we loosen ourselves in our daily walks, to wait for His guidance.  This loosening of our schedules and self-imposed time tables is the Liberty of choosing the Father's will.  And more importantly, the Father's will slots us into perfection and harmony with everyone else.

Everyone wins when we all go to the Father's plan.

But that clarity then, that perfect brilliant orb sitting high in the sky: the Sun, the promise of the Son returned.

"There are, however, no sharp lines or demarcations between the various operations just outlined.[thought and belief] The problem of attaining correct habits of reflection would be much easier than it is, did not the the different modes of thinking blend insensibly into one another."

-John Dewey, How We Think

"We ought to consider no only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing which must be taken into account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human.

For if we being to fall into dotage, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and the appetite, and whatever else there is of the kind, will not fail; but the power of making use of ourselves, and filling up the measure of our duty, and clearly separating appearances, and considering whether a man should now depart from life, and whatever else kind absolutely requires a disciplined reason, all this is already extinguished.  We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and understanding of them cease first."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book three.

"So far there is the same sort of situation as when one looking at a cloud is reminded of a human figure and face.  Thinking in both of these cases(the cases of belief and of fancy) involves a noted or perceived fact, followed by something else which is not observed but which is brought to mind, suggested by the thing seen.  

One reminds us, as we say, of the other."

-John Dewey, How We Think.

The cult of self, Jekyll was at times, up to being half a man, even that much, and other times, not equal to the task, barely putting in the niceties to keep up appearances.

As a half of person, he was out of his depth, but he kept to the line and gave no sign of the truth, that he imbibed himself into someone else.  This is like Stephen King and Peter Straub's other world behind the fog of drink, where good and evil fought tete-a-tete, where the real world reeked more of poverty and dissipation on its own terms.

Here I was thinking Jekyll should have had a third alter ego, something more of a happy medium, but decidedly different than the other too.  But I note Jekyll behaved secretively, and then openly and grand, as if he too were experimenting with making another personality, living his "best life" writ large in the society pages.  And that without a tonic, but his own life energy being used, that wick burning brighter and brighter still, folding down and down, until at last, he would disappear as Hyde for two mighty months.

Amor Fati, Memento Fati....

The bootless cries of a man against his destiny, and other such, the theme of failure as a watchword of the day, leading into the big anniversary tomorrow, Teresa Du'Tres and Felonge De Castille.

but a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage....

Cutting through a sort of melange of stuff, minutia, a sort of "virtue", a sharpened tendril of impetus cavorting and gnawing into the fiber moral, temporal, and so forth, having at the gutty works, and getting chased away like a beggar.

A kind of "honed edge" which meets the material that are put to it, such is to exercise a kind of superlative in a world of flats, but sharps in a room filled with weather balloons.

A kind of prolonged lukewarm birthday party for Kevin.

"And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, least by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope."

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Wee.

In the dominion of the static universe, perhaps I somewhat floated, or lensed as to have specific gravity, I sat like a lump of iron or a millstone, but all the way, the objectives and terabytes coursed through the thinkgood, the brainmeats, the very core of the nut, as it were, and thoughts and ideas, most insensate and ephemeral danced like sugar plums in my head.

All the while, tomorrow, another catcher in the sawgrass, something wicked this way, and various things leaping and cajoling about the various schedule apparatus, all sorts of bs scattering about, as if to be broadcast over a field, waves and waves of it to change the color of the leaves or freeze the mud puddles, or induce Mike Pence to go scurrying along.

There was a kind of trap door, where the hunter sleeps along the bottom of the aquarium, and he patiently waits for the lapse of attention from his prey, for which he pounce at the given opportunity afforded his leisure and guile: neigh, that's what it was, things floating about, an obscure flavored cigar of leisure and guile, and the smoke of that, a kind of rotary output, torque, measurable by machine.

I need to be much more specific about the output of my hobbies, I suppose, but a bit of art, flourish or flair, perhaps is the least indignity done to my little works, and that only showing indignity in the slightest backhanded sense, as if to blame me for the faults of others.

This is what I tell them of a role model: they make a mistake and blame it on the example of their idol, their icon, their stub toe pookah.  Blame that one, for all the good such does.

I have to decide too, when flaws should be changed, or whether that's sort of the paraphernalia of character traits, real identifiable markings and such.  Another opportunity to get it right, right? I cannot afford time-wise too disassemble myself everyday for some obscure arcane cleaning procedure, but perhaps just to dryfire the workings to see if the hammer and pin does what it should; but nevertheless I afford myself the opportunity to realize that I am here. I am here opportunity-plunking to catch the 10,000, 

(And that is how it was, in the first rays of 2023. I could/can feel it without remembering, or remembering without feeling, but never reverse polarity in time travelling into the mandelbrot 2023. It was.

I offer-up this from William Hazlitt remonstrating one of his contemporaries

"Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of thought. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity." Sad necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let us pause here a little.--Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by what had neither truth, nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling nor the least shew of reason in it?"

As was said of the Prince of Denmark in madness and good sense, it was intermixed. One could only mark the edges of one in seeing the beginning of the other, owing to the contrast of the two. Its not completely different from doing the necessary rituals to wipe one's ass.)

April becomes May, 2026.

The weather. Testy, dubious, and as it ever was, verging on hopelessly mad, but forever at odds with the notion that hope springs eternal. It was commonplace to hate the weather so much the more than any sense of dread or fear--consider, the climate change people, and the hecklers talking of decades old theories of Global Warming, saying its impossible while saying its the End Times--how easy it is to hate people, to shout them down, whatever, ignore them and whatsoever for doing nothing so contemptible as living their own truths--

oh let them I say, and it wasn't the damnable weather that fueled our epistle, crepiscular sagacious otherwise self-serving noise--

we had plenty of that, and if we monetized, we could finally afford our empathy, apathy, instead of borrowing against our entropy, atrophy and apostasy.

It was not signs of the End Times we were looking for, but signs of normalcy, were we all little trolls that needed it as a kind of ragebaiting fuel to carry us over onto the other page.

And then we found we had completed a full circle around our Monopoly board, and had the pleasure of May blossoms in which to look forward.

As hard the heart of weather's soul are the hopes of misguided mankind,

and the truest genius wiggles along either collecting his nuts or crunching them in repose

in whatever course of events, to profit thereby

our endowment, our crown and charger is the covered wager in whatever outcome, be it the tyranny that is all our yesses and noes, our a donut hole in our sweetest, silliest remembrances.

Ruminations on fish fillets, freedom, and belief: thoughts in good season.

"I catch you on the run. You say you're going to a volcano to rescue animals."

Was there really 25% or so in doubt of a plan in the universe, or even a goodness directed at them? Another 12-18% unsure of how to respond such that it endorsed either faith or doubt. To quote Trinity, "how modern the old folks have become!", when goodness is imputed, personification imputed, upon a static set of natural phenomena. 

It's our hopes templated onto a world that can be both cruel and provident, sometimes in the very same instance.

That one philosopher, thoughts out of season grown into such prodigiousness, very cranium pooched, while another was such behind and navel-gazing hard onto the popular consciousness, had come down from the mountaintop in tatters.

A veritable Der Gubermensch.

Could we say 68% were tokens of their system? Was this the upright plurality which is so frowned-upon by the freethinkers? 

And of the doubters pool and the non-committal blanks, were these the gradient of freethinkers that back-rowed and shunned Sunday Night, but sat in Bible Study behind the eyes of hungry racoons, ravenous squirrels, whom were the subset of mankind over-lapping from the universities, the television-obsessed, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and variously butt-pirates, drag-queens, dispensary agents, and highway men.....

Be ye not.... ...observers of the times....

Profligate information, the very bane of the supposed good dogmatics, and Meta with datasets such that their private portion of computer resources might be used to extract marketing insights. Nevermind a word in good season?

However it comes, I roar.

Push 2 to hear this message en Espanol.

Let me put to paper now the degaussing of this great big old sumbitch.

Bombast establishing all future bad behaviors, we find in go-rounds ahead certain expectations that will no doubt perturb all humanity. A client state called a hell-hole, our very 51st state, and then expressing the want of a 52nd and 53rd state, citing various good turns that could be lauded upon those populations. Many would anticipate conversely indolent lands become hellholes like that 51st, ignored until it becomes a gripping human interest story, until the power goes out, until Anderson Cooper arrives. It was an unfair pidgeon-holing, rhetoricaly, a self-inflicted papercut of pain without blood.

Not that I don't like the guy. Or don't like the populations of prospective client states.

"I knew it was you, Fredo."

But, he said it himself.

"Johnny Hola knows all the best places."

Better be glad Chuck Norris is cleaning-up the afterlife, because in the meantime, the truth is the route to freedom, and the yoke of bondage your "Purpose Driven Life", and I'll put it absolutely last on my to-do-list to condescend to purchase wildlife for pampering, in some guilded cage, chewing the furniture. I'd sooner purchase ass-butter for myself and your mother to use in our self-guided meditations of self-gratification while staring into each other's eyes like confused twenty-somethings, as if for the very first time, such perpetuity in its anger and "enlightened self-interest".

Anyway, of our "great big old sumbitch", gobbless and good luck, I says, because he is not only the very best of us, though some say not, and the most prominent of us, but he is also the worst of us. So I say, let the best of us have its perfect work in the contested dreams of our American leader. May the worst of us only touch light for the provenance of our cause for freedom, here and abroad.

Usual Suspects or "no surprise here":

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977). The Phenomenology Of Spirit. translated by Miller, A.V., Findlay, J.N. Oxford University Press. New York. ISBN 978-0-19-824597-1

Bronbach, Hollis(2026). Our Urethras Are Our Utopia: The New Our Persons, Ourselves. Fibner and Locust Micro/Macro Periodicals(Nashville, Mckinnon Freehold) https://www.thereasonedlife.com

Mill, John Schubert(1775). Motherfuck All Yall, My Rims Are Clean, Yall(3rd edition). translated by Raymond White(2004). Tandem House Press. Mt Croghan.

Earls, Aaron(@wardrobedoor, X.com)(2026). Growing Number Of Churchgoers Face Doubts. Lifeway Research. https://research.lifeway.com/2026/04/07/growing-number-of-churchgoers-face-doubts/