On Deathbeds and Airports

Hanging around
with people I'm not
leaving with
is not my style.

'Identity'

is only ego -
the booby-trap
of life.

Without goals

we cannot fail.

A History Lesson

The first Roman Empire
had 'bread and circuses'.

The second R.E.
had McDonald's and the movies.

Both had the largest standing
extra-territorial armies
ever known, and both collapsed
from the unsustainable luxury
of the rich.

No sea-change

A quantum leap
on a daily basis
will get you
nowhere fast.

The Dao of Change

'We have come to the point where the only possibility for change is to bring about a "movement" not to bring anything about.'

- Masanobu Fukuoka: The One-Straw Revolution

Reality

is how you think
when you think
if you think...

Today at Toulouse Central Station

While a man without socks
shouted continually
and peripatetically into
a dead cell-phone,
I read a newspaper headline:
'Half of the internet-users of France
download music and movies
illegally'. And so the masses
come to terms with technology.

The Prepuce-Collector

With the skyscrapers of foreskins
which He has been lumbered with since the
ill-considered pact with Abraham,
God has condemned himself,
worked His divine fingers to the bone,
making hundreds of thousands
- indeed millions - of lampshades, day in day out,
time beyond mind, to mitigate
the blinding illumination
of all the believers
in His celestial and cerebral Kingdom.

Around my (future) grave

where the snowdrops bloom today
I imagine many memorials -

the Tomb of the Unknown Battery Hen
the Tomb of the Unknown Fornicator
the Tomb of the Unknown Dissident
the Tomb of the Unknown Masturbator
the Tomb of the Unknown Drug-addict
the Tomb of the Unknown Tyre-Inflator
the Tomb of the Unknown Cock-cheese Eater
the Tomb of the Unknown Mitigator
the Tomb of the Unknown Dancing Bear
the Tomb of the Unknown Hesitater
the Tomb of the Unknown Wiped-out Species
the Tomb of the Unknown Perpetrator...

but I'm still alive and not yet due to occupy
the Tomb of the Unknown Dissipator.

Sodom - the first town

where people were unwelcome
except for capital or labour.

In our reductive and grasping culture

we have abolished praise.
We offer mere celebrity instead -
and mealy-mouthed, ungenerous
obits to the dead.

The Trap and Tragedy of Music

If only we could
do with smells
what we do with sounds...

Flags at the U.N.

Rags at a well.

Jesus was a simpleton

Mohamed was a crook.
Jesus got fisted.
Mohamed got twisted.

Religions of the Book!

On nation-states (and civilisations)

When they're not
bam
they're boozle

and usually both.

The erotic

is not necessarily
genital.
And the genital
is certainly
not necessarily
erotic.

Philosophers write

for professors;
thinkers for writers.

The last thing that schools and universities will do

is to tell us how to live good lives.

So what is the point of education ?
To break us in like helpless horses;
to make us literate consumers
and taxpayers, and members of
variously armed forces.

If 'multi-tasking' were possible

we would be able to think two thoughts at once.
Most of us, however, have difficulty
thinking two thoughts in ten minutes.

The Dao of Everything

Do as little as possible
unobstrusively

for unintended consequences
are inevitable.

I think, therefore I am trapped in thought.

Wise and Foolish

It's only because I'm penny-wise
that I end up being pound-foolish!

Down with Descartes!

I think -
therefore I am a criminal.

In a civilisation of hypocritical

robots,
petty theft
is the least of crimes.

The orgasm of war

Nothing
produces
a more general
feeling of love
than
collective
hatred.

Memetic

If we assume that new words describe new things, events, feelings,
boredom did not emerge in modern Europe until the late 18th century,
and the meme or notion of normality slightly later.

This was the beginning of the 'Industrial Revolution',
when time and people were routinely mechanised
and in the slowly-rising, filthy tide of our technology
we began and not by stealth
to turn ourselves into standardised machines for the production
and consumption of products and boredom and wealth.

Dodgy statistic

A hundred years ago
the most popular first name
(until recently called Christian name)
was - in England - John.
Now it is Mohamed.
Behold! the dawn
new-circumcised
with ruddy fingers
creeps o'er the lawn.


(100 years ago the number of Johns in a relatively narrow pool of names might have numbered millions. Today the number of Mohameds in a hugely-enlarged pool of names - in a much greater population - can be numbered only in tens of thousands.)

In 'science'

it is difficult
(though not impossible)
to be a fraud.
In the arts and
phoney
'social sciences'
it is difficult
not to be
a bawd.

Freedom of speech

turns speech into babble.
Freedom of the press
turns the witless to rabble.

Optimism

The most offensive thing
about optimism is its
smugness.