a depression-sufferer complain
about not wanting to do more
than just exist. How depressing
that so many billions of us
do not consider just existing
as a blessing!
Put another way:
Existential misery
and plummetings of mood
derive at least partly
from our refusal
to be simply content
to merely be (and enjoy
good food).
mistranslation of Heraclitus:
You cannot step into the same river twice.
Instead of:
You cannot step twice into the same flow of water.
Especially under a bridge.
At the end
what most of us –
if conscious behind
the tubes, the wires and the screen
– what most of us want
is a hug or a hand-squeeze,
or just a smile,
not a hook-up to another machine.
Time is abstract of trauma.
 |
| Part for part: a kidney has been paid for just part of his failed migration from Eritrea. |
and, before them, banks
have been described, decried
as Cathedrals to Money,
Towers of Mammon.
But cathedrals and temples always
were the result of great endowment
by moral and spiritual famine.
The Israelis have announced
a General Plan for Gaza,
a zone of their most intense interest,
eerily reminding us of the Nazi
General Government of Poland (1939-1945)
administered by one of the worst war-criminals,
General Hans Frank.
'The Jews' (I term I hate to use)
are currently and perhaps henceforth
known more for their vengeance
than their suffering.
And maybe
sometime soon, some A.I. fake-news video
will show an Israeli soldier eating
a Palestinian baby.
(the) loss of 'innocence',
but the lack (and fear) of intimacy
which has little to do with sex
(except tangentially)
and whose absence turns us into
reality-reducing wrecks.
There was a lavatory (beyond the coalhouse)
in the gloomy back-yard
of our narrow, semi-detached victorian house :
for lower-status people,
the sort who came only to the back door.
It was probably not meant for men to piss in
unless they took their trousers down.
Although we had scratchy, unabsorbent
'medicated' toilet-roll
in our small bathroom-lavatory upstairs,
the outside installation
which I always thought was not too clean
had torn bits of The Radio Times
or The Northern Whig
(a rag as right-wing as The Daily Mail)
hanging from a loop of string
upon a rusty nail.
As a child
it didn't cross my foggy mind that this was mean.
It housed a yard-brush, a garden fork, a spade....
as well as spiders. earwigs and the occasional snail.
It was like this, with bench seat
and circular hole, (and a front panel)
but the walls were distempered yellow.
"In the International Arena,"
the same meanness
of Europe and NATO
in doling out proper assistance
in dribs and drabs
almost cost Europe's
outside lavatory (Ukraine)
its very existence.
is not a psychedelic substance
but the shy, nocturnal,
dog-like, marsupial, extinct
Tasmanian Tiger
which may soon
be 'resurrected'
– before the Trump of Doom.
 |
| last one, photographed in 1936. |
 |
| Messier-87 |
A tiny chunk of a neutron star,
the size of a sugar cube,
could weigh a billion tons.
More challenging than
the mysteries of astrophysics
is the infinitesimal question of how
the animal minds that can approach
(and indeed photograph) them
can wage senseless, bloody
wars for ownership of bits
of the tiny, ultimately ownerless Earth.
gets to Everlasting Life upon this planet
is the eternal, equal fight
between its two smallest, most basic critters:
bacteria and viral bacteria-eaters.
Why is it so rare ?
It is such wonderful
and justified revenge.
I love Lorena Bobbitt –
and the brave few others.
Unfortunately, it is
an extremely slow method
of population- and hence
of CO₂- reduction.
I'm quite sure that
over the millennia
quite a lot of men (millions, maybe ?)
have savaged women's breasts
and nipples...
Elektric Kundalini!
especially when accompanied by Rachmaninov.
When I decided that I was not bisexual,
or confused, but queer, I assumed
like a typical Aspy that all other queers
would be lovely, sweet. liberal, gentle men.
I was taken to Heaven on Leicester Square, London:
horribly noisy but wonderful, colourful fun.
However, I read today,
at the same time, 'from 1974 until 1993,
9pm to 2am, seven nights a week, men
packed the dance-floor of Studio One,
West Hollywood, California.'
“It was the happiest place on Earth,”
remembers one patron, who, of course,
had not been pushed out of the door
for being a Person of Color.
 |
| Studio One, West Hollywood, 1980s |
عنب أكبر
Wine
is the Blood of the Tortured Vine
and Art
the pressings of the hardening heart.
that an American pick-up truck company
is called RAM, as in the verb, though
its logo is, misdirectingly a male sheep.
A recent model is a 'mini-tank' that anyone can drive –
requiring no special aptitude, no life-or-death decision –
into the Capitol or down Mexico way.
The RAM 1500 is 'lethal in a collision'.
 |
| “A truck is a tool*, but a Ram – a Ram is life.” |
*Old slang for penis.
everyone you don't know is the enemy
and also some of those you do.
Even so, it sometimes seems to me
that to plant a tree might be more
beneficial than to support democracy,
one of whose main problems is the
induced and wilful ignorance
of the electorate.
The other may be the parliamentary absence
of the secret ballot.
said Salman Rushdie
(not my favourite writer)
in an interview,
is a disease,
perhaps an infection.
I think that it's more
of an addiction.
most people know
little more than sushi;
certainly not
孤独死 kodokushi
which can be translated as
just left to rot.
in Stuttgart after opera of live sex and piercing.
“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” said choreographer Florentina Holzinger.
I don't think we want to expand
our oppressive minds so much as
to escape them
by means of liquids, powders, work,
day-dreaming, games, gaming, books,
sport, sex, pornography, risk, war...
The tenth of October
is World Porridge Day.
It comes in many forms
and can be made from any grain,
but for me the quintessential
epicentral sludge has to be made
from pin-head oatmeal (not sissy flakes)
soaked overnight (or at least an hour)
and served with sour milk, sour cream,
fromage blanc, curds or even kefir,
with a sprinkling of brown cane-sugar
(maybe with cinnamon for kids ?)
on the top for crunch.
It can also be made with full-cream milk
instead of water, but is then a tad too rich.
Trouble (I'm Evil)
Donald Trump's Victory Song, November 2024.
because...
Imagine having 20 relatives to lose
(or even a father) ...
I'm glad that I have none.
In another newspaper article
I read that people's lives collapse
if their mobile phones are snatched.
Leave the totalitarian things at home !
A famous person is doubly so
for having a urinal in his house
because of the inconvenient height
of water-closets which are too tall
for the health of our bowels
(bidets – good also for feet – are just about right),
and too low for standing-up men
& 'the handicapped'.
Perhaps it is utilitarian like this:
or verging on the obscene like al-Fayed's:
Washbasins, good for hands and torsos,
are too low for washing the face,
and slightly too high for many men
(and adolescents) to piss in,
though easy to rinse with taps
and even wash the willy afterwards.
Petty pleasurable guilt I had,
and guilty pleasure on learning
that the domineering neighbour
I had come to dislike
had had a massive stroke. It will be fine
to see no more the weekly row
of six black underpants upon his washing-line.
Peculiarly,
instead of resentment that he had
succeeded in expiring before me
and (painlessly, swiftly as I hope
to exit) had 'pipped me at the post' – I felt
a horrible triumph at outliving him.
I am as muddledly
mean-minded as anybody else.
.jpg) |
| One of his contemptuous autumn paintings. |
succinctly on Trump:
He's not even interested in the Presidency.
He's only interested in Winning.
Degrowth
? ? ?
Another (unrelated) word:
(to) present (as in a film or other spectacle)
seems to be much the same in all European languages
and comes from mediæval Latin præsentare, presumably from the presentation of the Host at Mass. The modern French for a knick-knack or objets-d'art shelf or cabinet is présentoir.
As for the noun: it came into English around 1200, from Latin,
The difference between present and gift is felt in the fact that one may be willing to accept as a present that which he would not be willing to accept as a gift : a gift is to help the one receiving it; a present does him honour, or expresses friendly feeling toward him. A present is therefore ordinarily to an individual; but in law gift is used, to the exclusion of present, as including all transfers of property without consideration and for the benefit of the receiver. [Century Dictionary]
Let us consider a new word and what it might mean: Depresent.
(After all, we have Degenerate.)
* * *
I recently bought a Stainless steel casserole with lid.
This description appeared on the packing in every official E.U. language (plus Russian and Turkish) except Icelandic, Irish, Albanian, Catalan, Luxembourgeois, Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish.
The following puzzled me: Dengta keptuvė su Dangčiu
(which I identified as Lithuanian because of the ė),
Kastrolis ar Vāku (Latvian because of the ā) ...
but Skirts Troškinimui and Karstumizturigs....might one of them be Maltese ?
The over-washed people
in the museum :
are they there to gaze,
to worship or fill in time ?
of gender barriers & stereotypes
would be a lovely and beneficial thing
if men became more womanly
and women stopped becoming
more and more like scary men.
of Sunflowers
and Rapeseed and Wheat and Maize...
The pipsqueak who sentenced the soup-throwers to many months in prison would not have acknowledged Van Gogh as a human being, much less bought one of his paintings.
The sunflower series is the most popular and least interesting of his amazing output. This action should make us think again about these paintings.
A writer in the Guardian points out that the great Vincent would not have wanted his paintings (other people thought of them as 'daubs') to be venerated, much less entombed in the terrifying concrete mausoleum of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
'During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty.'
He wanted his pictures to hang on domestic walls, he wanted to share his uplifting and inspiring vision of landscape and people.
I think that he would have been appalled to learn where they have ended up.
Jews,
who have been persecuted only throughout
recorded history,
should spare a thought for wolves,
persecuted for at least ten thousand years.
Unfortunately, they spare few thoughts
for their nearest fellow-humans
who live their whole lives beset by howling fears.
Whereas we (mostly) can't
tune into each other, dogs
can tune into shepherds,
sheep and other dogs
almost simultaneously.
More than 100,000 plant species are thought to be undiscovered,
the majority of which are believed to be at risk of extinction...
