Re-incarnation

might be in the past.

If Kali forbid! I were to be
reborn I would like to return
as a sterile spermatozoon
of a happy, hairy man.

The Work Ethic

is based on the assertion
that idle dreaming
leads to subversion.

Unintentional haiku

by Frankie Boyle (Meantime 2022, page 130)

Moon, the cloudy white
eye of a disinterested
universe.

The sheer shallowness

of Western culture revealed itself i
n the vapid, culturally-restricted
and almost totalitarian
"counter-culture" which it accommodated

and I observed as an anti-counter-cultural 
drop-out.

“Every sort of contradiction can be found in me,”

 - Michel de Montaigne.

Why is the Catholic Church

so 'exercised' about sex,
when its Saviour was
probably asexual ?

 

Dear Mr Trump,

 "Most of the world's problems
come from the fact that
stupid people talk louder."

- Frankie Boyle, Meantime (2022)

Throttling the world.

'Bayer (Germany) and Corteva (US)
control 80 per cent of patents
for genetically modified seeds.'

What do they care
about people's actual needs ?

https://aeon.co/essays/

My new friend

is having a bad hair day.

Polka-dot Batfish by Matthew Sullivan

 

Funeral music, British humour.

The most popular music
for British funerals
is Eric Idle's 
Always look on the bright side of life.

When all's said and done, say no more.

By definition

prophets are unsubtle
except when being gnomic.
Their followers interpret them
subtly, or selectively,
which leads to schism
and rank hypocrisy.
Subtle prophets
are philosophers.

 

Diogenes might have said

that he'd rather share a bed
with a dog than a human.
I would probably have agreed,
without making a choice
between man or woman,
between lice and fleas.

Lifestyle.

We consumers
should not be blamed
for what we consume,
but only for consuming.

Being sociable

is not the same as
being addicted to social grooming.

Darkly-amusing juxtaposition.

You know there is something wrong

with a diplomatic event
when it begins with a photo
of the guest of honour
standing next to a child sex trafficker
being projected on to Windsor Castle.

Fact and Fiction

In fiction you know
what people are thinking.
In fact, you do not.

Diogenes said

(and Schopenhauer agreed)
that any immortality would be hell.

Diogenes in Dijon.

 

A waking thought.

There have been

in Russo-Greek Christian 'Orthodoxy'

self-styled, often uncouth

Fools for Christ.

But none like Diogenes

who has been described as

Fools for Truth.

Virtual Connections.

I see
another one
has "ghosted" me
which happens
quite regularly
when I encounter
members of the
actual bourgeoisie.

Dressing up

in England.

"Jack-in-the-Green"

The Putin of the World Wide Web

Worth more than a Himalaya of sugar.

Mark Zuckerberg

The missing comma.

 A country that presents itself falsely is not to be trusted.
(Well, no country, except perhaps San Marino can be trusted)

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
is a masquerade, a false representation
because the Kingdom of Ireland
(of which the present Northern Ireland
is a fragment) ceased to exist in 1800.

In 1922 most of Ireland bloodily seceded from the United Kingdom, leaving an entity, curiously named Northern Ireland
and not North Ireland (like, say, North Korea, North Macedonia,
or South Sudan) officially, practically, legislatively
closer to the UK than the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands
(which are a lordship and dependencies respectively)
but a separate entity which will eventually secede.  

So the UK's proper title should contain a comma,
or, better, a dash:
the United Kingdom of Great Britain - and Northern Ireland
trailing in its abominable, royal footsteps.

The Oddity of [my] Memory

I have been re-reading Peter Carey's
splendid satire Oscar and Lucinda
which I first read in 1989 or 1990. 
I remembered the cover, the title
and my enjoyment, but forgot
every ferocious iota of the plot.

If, however, the book had been called
The Glass Church
I'm pretty sure my memory would not
have left me in the lurch.

Kargah e hasti.

The poet-philosopher
Jalaludin Rumi
suggested that
I should think of Being
as Workshop.

But, having been
a fatherless technophobe,
workshops frightened me

and I am not a fan of work
or indeed employment
that is not enjoyment.

For most people
life is (at least) a tussle, 
but for me it's more
of an astrophysical puzzle.

On my 84th birthday.

Time out of mind
Time out of mud
Mind out of blood
Yet mud is so kind

Mount Olympos.

 

Up there in the pure white snow
the gods played sordid, vicious games;

and now below,
corruption rules, as
any hard-won democracy
is bought by any
festering autocracy.

The name of my edgy homeland.

Why NorthERN Ireland,
when Northern denotes the vage north of a country
as in Northern France or The North of England,
Northern Australia,

and North denotes a separate country
such as North Korea, North Macedonia,
likewise South Sudan and, indeed South Africa 
and North and South America ?

Seoul is in northern South Korea...

'Being Yourself'

is not easy
in the totalitarian
moralistic state
of liberal democracy, 

and almost impossible
in an autocracy.

Justice for Everyone.

Banksy 2025

 

Today's weather :

 coming straight at me.

Monthly check-up.

Hello, doctor.
I'm fine, thank you : some slight
dizziness when standing upright
after sitting down,
sometimes while walking in the town,
sometimes resulting in a faint.

Problems with hearing and with sight.
"Post-it" psoriasis on my thigh:
I could write a note on it and peel it off .

Permanent bloat .
(Another ventral hernia before I die ?
or just gastritis or intolerance of food,
like any ageing saint ?)

Otherwise, I have no complaint,

for, on the other hand, I seem to have
a highly-advanced Übermensch prostate
which has enabled me simultaneously
to piss and ejaculate.

If I'm still alive next month
I'll post another cheerful Old Age Update. 

Jawsome!

 

Migration.

Eighty years ago
Stalin removed to Central Asia
the entire population of Chechenya
in one of his sadistic population games. 

A third of them perished. 
The rest were deprived of their Chechen names.

Up to (and maybe beyond)
two hundred thousand Chechens died
in the two Russo-Chechen wars of the 1990s.

Since then, over a third
of the remaining Chechen population have fled.

Let us now talk of "illegal immigrants".

The Jews want to move the Philistines,
now called Palestinians,
but really they would prefer them dead.

Garlic and snails.

The food of the enemy
can also become the enemy.

The last time I cried

was in 2002 when my dog died.

Cancer diagnosis.

 

Social costs.

The Nation State doesn't care
a tinker's fart for your welfare
even if you live in a shanty-town.

Costs and statistics are what.
The poor are expenses to be kept down.

Frankly,

many of the Bordeaux
and Côtes du Rhône wines
sold in French supermarkets
under €12 aren't worth
much more than this.

The corruption of queerness.

When I was young 'homosexuals' were
special people. Either they were
literary intellectuals like Wilde and Joe Ackerley
(who, like me, was in love with a dog)

or they were 'working class', like Joe's
ill-treated lover, stocky and strong
and smelling of sweat or carbolic or both.

'Homosexuality' was forbidden, therefore exciting,
hence its attraction.  Now anyone
with neither brain nor brawn
nor criminality can be 'gay'. 
Homo-mediocrity is here to stay.

Today's photo

is by an Amazon courier.

I got it!

 

'The People', Fellow Republicans

or self-hating populace
bond desperately with populists
who so despise them.

POPVLVS MVLTVM OTIVM HABET
ATQVE MVLTI SVNT AVARI.

Rome became a republic, Athens a very limited democracy.

Eternal plastics.

Molecules
from my horrible, scorched
Terylene trousers from the 1950s
may be in your bloodstream.

 

Armageddon.

A wasp's nest
pillaged by a badger.

photo by Mark Cocker

A brilliant term

to describe many 'liberals' :
COMMISSARS OF LANGUAGE.

But behind the language-commissars
are the Thought-controllers
of the Deep State of unmitigated morality.

 

TRUMP SET TO ABOLISH WWW

Not (yet) true.
But this is certain:

Concerning which, it is no surprise
that the world's chief supplier
and consumer of pornography
is the world's chief supplier and consumer
of cadavers (corpses) and body-parts...

[more on this on October 3rd]

British society is currently

getting its knickers in a twist again
about petty (not organised) shoplifting.
Retailers claim that it puts prices up
for those who pay.  But surely 
shoplifting by the poor consists of
minute and miserable attempts to remedy
grotesque inequalities in society ?

A painter I'd never heard of until today,

underclass,
queer pride
from Ayrshire :
Bobby MacBryde.

In theory, you cannot

in a Liberal Democracy
be coerced to be free.
Except in the USA.

Multiple

is a loathsome recent introduction
which means More than three.

It has replaced 'several' (more than 5),
'many' and 'a lot' (more than 10)
and 'a large number'.