Life is somewhat like a cucumber.

Other people sow and grow
and harvest it, then you and they
cut slices off it
until the wrinkled end.

As old age advances,

transitioning to a stuffy old fart is disturbingly predictable:

I have become prudish and Puritan, 

like Abrahamic Elders and Paul the Apostle.

As an 'outsider'

I once identified
(to some extent) as queer or invert
or one of those
because queers were then beyond the pale.

Now I am beyond the pale for queers
and every identity except nonentity.

it's good to be a misanthropic nobody,
especially in a world of pseudo-individuals.

Being nobody is good
provided you can secrete, protect
your nonentity successfully.

(Indeed there is a Catch in everything.)

'Continentals'

was a term of slight-to-moderate abuse
applied by the English to Europeans east of England,
because, of course, the English could not deny
that they were European – until now
that they are half-American.

Ferdinand Laholli

is an Albanian poet
now living in Germany.

He spent the first 30 years of his life in

THE SAVRA INTERNMENT CAMP

Here you are afraid to speak,

afraid to be silent.

Here you are afraid to smile,

afraid to be sad.

Here you are afraid

not to be afraid.

more of my translations from the Albanian >

Good to know.

 

Gloss on Sir Edward

(who was not a Dyer).

My mind to me a torment is.

His was, I think, to Baudelaire.

I'd love to have no consciousness,

be nothing more than gentle air.

One of my favourite English words :

Crestfallen.

I imagine a sad cock (male fowl) or parrot,
and indeed:
                     crestfallen (adj.)
"dejected, dispirited," 1580s, creast falne...

 Crest-risen –"proud, lusty" is from 1610s.

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You know about civet cats and coffee beans.

– No ?
The civet eats the coffee berries
which soften in its gut and are excreted whole.
They are collected and roasted.
They have a subtle under-taste of cherries.

The Javanese used civets this way in the 18th century
because they were forbidden by the very mean,
very nasty Dutch from entering the coffee-plantations. 
Civets think the berries are delicious.
It was hard to prevent The Thieving Natives
from scooping up their droppings.

Unlike trees,

we all - even newborn babies -

live too long.

"Like a fox nesting

behind a bus depot,
he's a creature making the best of an environment
to which he is in some respects maladapted."

– Ned Beauman, GLOW.

A yellow life, nice and easy. No eyes needed.

A Gummy Squirrel – Psychropotes longicauda – is a type of sea cucumber. This specimen is 60 cm long with red palps, or lips
with which it feeds on sediment on the ocean floor
5,100 metres below the surface.

The waning of traditional religious cults

has been replaced in Britain by the cult of royalty,

and in the USA by the cult of Trump.

The texture of the sun.

 

Why has no-one told them

that goals are bad and hollow ?

 

Grotesque hypocrisy and appropriation.

A mathematical genius
hounded for his homosexuality
until he killed himself,
now features on British money.

Longest and highest.

Two beautiful bridges
link the two French départements
of the Aveyron and the Tarn.
The first, a cantilevered railway-bridge, was inspired
by the then-recent Eiffel Tower and built
by the same construction-company
between 1897 and 1902, and had
the widest span of any steel-structure
in the world.

The second (also chosen from an open competition)
is a state-of-the-art, elegantly-curving
motorway suspension-bridge,
so high that fog forms and clouds descend below it.

Thanks to Socialism and the handsome Jean Jaurès
(pacifist, assassinated in 1914) it cost far fewer lives.

But (dear, less handsome, Lord Rogers)
it intrudes upon the landscape rather brutally.

Freedom of speech

just like its suppression

can too easily lead to

the overwhelming of truth.

Idiopathy - NFNSS

The good news for solosexuals
is that (as in my own case)
masturbation may get better
as you get older
and maybe more creative.

Andrey Kurkov :

“Basically, Russians are monarchists and Ukrainians are anarchists.”

Just like the difference between the English and the Irish.

Atheism has never been

 a reason or a pretext for war.

Fresco, Rocamadour, France. © Artem Kotyenko.

City Life : Hong-Kong

Half of a micro-flat accommodating three people.

Turn left.

 

One of the thousands

of things that I have never understood
is why people want to be popular
rather than themselves.
I have always been one of the earnest,
uncomprehending Babes in the Wood.

'Floral Tributes'

What majestic tree
was sacrificed
in its prime
to make a coffin
for a figurehead ?

Whence came the flowers
for the thousands of glib
and vulgar 'floral tributes'
to the dead

queen of the Chagos Islands
'cleared' (like the Scottish Highlands)
of their inhabitants,
and lightly, poisonously populated
by the American military instead ?

Zolpidem

is a short-acting sleep-aid
which I have been taking for some years.

It has the side-effect underlined below,
which should be reported to my physician.
'Doctor, this drug is making me feel good.
 Help me to escape its evil clutches.
 Please don't tell Big Brother.'

Our culture cannot tolerate too great a sense of well-being.

They have nothing better to do.

As you read this
at least ten million men are masturbating,
at least ten million people women
are being raped,
and a thousand trees are being chopped down
(to be burnt) in the Amazon basin.

"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do".

Frankly, I prefer

this (by the naif  Morris Hirschfield)

to this (by the creepy Michelangelo).

Hirschfield's painting is so much more fun
that I am happy to be a Philistine.

A nice little exchange on the notorious 4chan.

  Anonymous 09/05/22(Mon)18:10:38 No.4076722   [Reply]▶

Is becoming a wedding photographer a good idea?

 Anonymous 09/14/22(Wed)14:48:38 No.4079663▶

>>4076722 (OP)
Any job where you're directly dealing with the public is a bad idea.

It's not nice to say but a very large portion of people are either very stupid, unreasonable, uncivilized to the point of being antisocial, and any combination of the above.

Even if the vast majority of people you encounter are good and everything goes smoothly, you'll always have a percentage of clients like this, and even it's overall worth it because of the money, doing what you love, etc. you need to question whether it's worth the effect it has on your psychology and the way you see the world and humanity.

 

Mainly the Palaces,* not the Prisons.

The recently-deceased
fawned-upon monarch
of a shameless, genocidal
United Kingdom (in which
I was born in nineteen-forty-one)
once said to President Mandela that she had
'seen more of Africa than almost anyone'.

Ah, the crassness of the Windsors
and the greyish whites !
But I guess that the saintly Nelson
was well-used to mindless slights.

*and boulevards, and lush plantations in Kenya.

from The Guardian
King Charles’s staff given redundancy notice during church service for Queen.

Exclusive: Employees said to be livid and shaken
as up to 100 Clarence House employees told they could lose their jobs.

"Never strike a child in anger"

 – only 'in cold blood' !

(Food for thought.)

Brand-names

which almost everyone has heard of – even me : 

Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, JCB,
McDonald's, Kleenex, the British Royal Family,

Google, YouTube, WhatsApp...but I think
no longer Semtex ('The Stronger
Explosive', not the drink).

Incomprehension.

There is a very large number of things
that I don't understand about people –
among them why we, who invented language,
are so frightened of using it to make
'real communication', but, instead, use it
to block other means of communication
enjoyed by animals.

Nor do I understand why I fret so much
about not understanding people.

A reflection on the lynching of Emmett Till

in Mississippi in 1955.

Ze'ev Zabotinski's

essay written in 1910.

Star-nosed mole & White-hearted glass frog.

On Stammering (unkindly called Stuttering).

My best friend (20 years dead)
had a bad stammer.  I had the bad habit
of finishing his sentences when I knew
what he was going to say – which was often.

This may be why he left his rich sister
his considerable estate, and me (living on welfare)
just £50 and some of his books –
which I, being a library-lover, declined.

I used to stammer – until I left school
(but not in French) and would have been delighted
for other people to finish my sentences.
Now I stammer only when angry, especially in French,
and still haven't learned to shut up.

RICHEST WOMAN IN WORLD DIES.

Homeless people and refugees

can't fall further on their knees.

Successor will be Lord of Flies.

Meeting Boris Johnson and Liz Truss together
on Tuesday in her delicate condition was obviously too much,
but she had no option as head of state.

Deferred manslaughter ?  Or a mercy-killing ?

Why not medicalise racism

like 'they' medicalised
divergent sexuality –

then send diagnosed racists
for Electro-convulsive
and Aversion Therapies ?

'Animals'.

Roger Waters' 1970s prediction
that The Sheep would conquer the world
has turned out to be true. Sheople,
look around you; it is hard to tell 
sheople from sheeple.

Apart from Bhutan,

the only country of any size without armed forces
is Costa Rica,
which is about the same size as Denmark
and, since 1949, has been prohibited by its constitution
to have a standing army.

Ireland is half as big again.
One of its shames is that it hitherto
has had and will continue to have
a quite unnecessary and pointless army
since its first (partial) liberation
from the UK in 1922.

Finally, a group I can join !

SUV Tyre/Tire Extinguishers.

But the only SUV I can find in my rural French village
belongs to Bernard, the local [Real] Estate Agent,
who drives up muddy lanes and across fields,
and also is a 'friend' in the sense that I address him
in the intimate form, tu.

It was probably wonderful

to have had the playful Paul Klee as a father.

He made lovely glove-puppets like this one for his son.

I'm sure both would have liked this witty assemblage/sculpture.

Sociable People's

sociability
is spread 
rather thinly.

In the Beginning was the Turd

And the Turd came from Dog

And Dog was Word

And the World was Turd

And Dog saw that it would have to do

and wandered on.

I have never had a lifelong pal,

but I have had friends:

(1)  My body, which has been wonderfully good to me,
and in my 81^st year has given me no aches or pains or nasty conditions.
(2)  Dogs.
(3)  The BBC (mainly Radio 4, but in the 1960s and 1970s also Radio 3).
(4)  Books (mostly ‘literary’ novels).
(5) Plants, including trees.  

Humans (other than my mother and her sister) come a poor sixth.

I nominate my body as my best friend and lifelong pal.

If this is by Picasso,

(picture at top right)
he became an even worse painter
than I imagined.

Was Imelda swindled ?
Or was Picasso a far, far greater fraud than Dalí
ever since he 'stole' Cubism
from Juan Gris ?

Imelda Marcos, 2007

Hallelujah!

The world of men

shriekingly denies

the sensuality

of frugality.

And so it dies. 

Extract from a letter.

" I was thinking of sending off for a DNA test ($100)
in the hope of finding something out about my father
(my male genomic precursor)
at this late stage of my existence –
but then I started wondering what I would do
if I “found” a half-brother/sister (who had maybe died)
or a niece or nephew or grand-nephew…

What would be the point of contacting them ? 
It would be unlikely that we would 'have anything in common' and the chances of them wanting to meet me (or I them) would be remote. I had little, and have no connection with cousins on my mother's side.
And there would always be the possibility that no relative would show up at all if my (allegedly) Air Force father had been killed
in WW2 (and hadn’t impregnated anyone else in the meantime), or even remained single."

I showed so little interest in my father before my mother's death in 1999 that I never even asked if she knew his surname!

Her unwanted pregnancy ruined my mother's life. 

Pity the poor people

who left or refused to join The Rat Race
and now have no-whither to escape!

Today I wrote a blog scheduled for April 2023.

It is about woodworm and entropy.

How we love the idea of Survival Guilt !

Maybe it assuages our discomfort
at Israel's vicious Survival Triumph ?
We rarely pause to reflect that Zionism
preceded Nazism, a mirror-image
of the ancient and continuing
Caucasian/Aryan/Christian racism
which has engulfed the world.

Meet Wally, Emotional-Support Alligator.

 He is famous for his hugs. People come from all over the world to get one.
Click here for more..

Super-tankers.

In the ocean
of 'information'
only the Big Beasts
are audible.

"Parasitic Whiteness

renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.
These deformed appetites particularly target non-white peoples.
Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate."

from an article by Donald Moss in JAPA
(Journal of the American Psycho-analytical Association,
Journal of the American Psychological Association,
or Journal of the American Planning Association).

A Coconut Octopus

 looking out from its clam-shell hide.  See more.

photo by Samuel Sloss

The catastrophe of language

(and its metre and its rhyme)
came much, much later
than the disaster of our pre-species
which stood on four legs so little of the time.