Fess Up, Stupid

Fake Leadership:
I think it's like this: if you're not bright, if you're dim, you really need someone to follow, otherwise you're just stumbling around bumping into the world as it evolves every single day. I mean there's a lot of decisions dim folks would have to make if left up to their own devices - who to hate for the rise in the price of potatoes, who to hate for the minimum wage not covering the cost of rent and basic items, who to hate for being too lazy to take one's own life by the scruff of the neck and shaking it into something halfway decent. 
I think if you really are stupid the first step is admitting that you're stupid. Cos every decision you make has a grave risk of being the wrong one. And dozens upon hundreds upon thousands of wrong decisions must become in short order an impossible burden to willingly take responsibility for. Not only that but you risk the lives and livelihoods of countless other people who more or less know what they'r…

The Ancient River of Ad

The river of Ad is ancient, broad and voluminous. Its tendrils reach every creek bed, every gully, every nook, every bend every rivulet, stream and oxbow, and nowadays of course every strip, every high street, every mall. 
The ancient Egyptians, it is said, manufactured a sweeping detour of the Nile near old Cairo so that boatsmen, usually naked but predominantly elbows and knees, could wield their low-tech craft by the squared feet of the pentacled pentagram adorning the Great Pyramid, there to be visually asphyxiated also, suffice it to say their eyes momentarily affixed on the unsuffixed Sphinx, by the brethren and schwesterthren of the Great Pyramid - Larry, Moe, Curly, Groucho, Harpo (who always carried a chromatic harmonica) and Karl.
The river of Ad is now, with the advent of bits and ones and bound-to-fail start-ups, inside our pockets, on every flat mat surface worth the name. One is deluged by Ad and it's descendants all day every day and 24 hours every night. 48 hours a d…

Bent Knee Walking

Ronnie killed himself
And then he killed himself a second time.
Third time’s a charm, said Grandma eventually. Grandma eventually was not her real name.  Her real name was Grandma inthefullnessoftime.
She was bent at the waist, the full right angle.
Her stoop was stooped.
But she kept her knees well groomed
And her table horizontal.
If not me, she used to say, then who?
To which I would reply: Plastic is the future. She hated plastic, anything actually that was built since the war.
If we’d had plastic before the war we would have died sooner although
cleaner. That’s not what she’d say but you could hear her think it
By the rattle in her disintegrated hips.  Grandpa’s rattle came from his pirate-issue eye-patch and the distance between that eye-patch and any kind of ocean-going vessel.
He had a thing for hyphens also.  Aunty Betty was no aunt of mine. She had the vertical mouth creases of a chimpanzee and a sparse, Serengeti moustache that reached all the way around to behind her tiny flattened e…

Texture and Second Life

I am one of those people who never saw the attraction in 'Second Life'... a kind of online role-playing alternate reality. I say alternate reality because that's what the SL people like to think of it as. 

But it ain't exactly alternate reality. Not in equal doses. It's like 100 percent alternate and zero percent reality. 

If you like imagining making out with a drawing of a woman that sometimes flickers or walks through poorly drawn walls, bars, fences or swimming pools then Second Life may be your cup of tea. 

Sorry, drawing of a cup of tea. 

And now, today, I discover ASMR. This is a phenomena where people are extra turned on by textural things - whispering, blow-drying towels, scratching sounds, peeling bananas and god knows what else. 

Now if the stiffs at Second Life ever got together with the stiffs a ASMR, or AMSR, or ARSM, they might have 50 percent of something. But I guess they never will, cos, you know, the whole flickering cartoon thing....

Legacy vs Grab 'em by the Pussy

George Washington: 1 state, 1 national capital, 30 counties, 43 towns, 12 universities and colleges, 1 lake, two mountains, 1 island, 4 major bridges, the 1 dollar bill, national hero, commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), America’s first president. Realizing that the way he handled the job would impact how future presidents approached the position, he handed down a legacy of strength, integrity and national purpose... Donald Trump: 6 bankruptcies, 2 paid-off prostitutes, 1 pee-pee tape, 1 fake university, 1 son Eric, 1 son Donald, some buildings, racist father, corrupt sister, oversaw longest US government shutdown in history, makes fun of the differently abled, tiny hands, fake hair, fake doctor, face Attorney General, cheats at golf, obstructs justice, traitor, colludes with commies

Going Caboose

I woke up to the sunlight streaming in through the slanted roof window. Tiny birds sang a chaotic chorus out in the world, the manicured gardens, the spaces between houses and apartment towers. "We're still here," they sang. 
"None of us are getting out of this alive," I thought. 
I slipped on my trousers, changed shirts, clambered down the spiral wooden staircase, my mind two steps behind.
The children were already up, bent over cereal bowls and leaning in to the morning. Sunshine here is a rare commodity. Mostly it is strangled by the cloud cover, fleets of dark panzas floating in tight formation and determined to vomit at the slightest glitch.
I looked at my daughters, five and 12, their eyes huge and glowing, and wondered what kind of world could I personally leave for them. I keep pumping them, priming their minds with sets of tools, with turns of phrase, with oblique and askew ways of seeing totally normal things, to show them where the exits are, where the p…

The Soul as the Ultimate Real Estate
