warp&woof
rightly heard all tales are one
It was just a game, that’s all it was. They didn’t have to pay me. I’d have paid them to let me play. Listen, the truth is it was more than fun. It was heaven.
Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise — even in their own field.
For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck–of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom–and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back the bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you’re not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It’s limited by what it has been, by what’s happened to it. And a people, until that time when it’s uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits.
Annabelle, the dying stars
Are falling down on us.
They got an easy way.
Let’s you and me
Go falling, too,
Way out into the blue.
Hey, hey, hey.
Please don’t you ever die,
You ever die,
You ever die.
You moved me all of my life,
All of my life,
All of my life.
Hum our radio song,
Radio song,
Radio song.
After every radio’s gone,
Radio’s gone,
Radio’s gone.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures
Hack Wilson usually played in the outfield, but I’d put him at first base because he wouldn’t have as far to stagger to the dugout.
Mike Royko
To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. … Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life.
It’s a trap
That much is plain
Still,maybe send snapshots
Of all your sweet pain
Playing tortuous games
It goes: Lense, light, fame
Read my names on your lips
When the man cracks the whip
And you’ll all shake your hips
And you’ll all dance to this
Without making a fist
And I know that it sounds mundane
But it’s a stone cold shame
How they got you tame
And they got me tame
The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”
“What kind of authors do you like?” I asked, speaking in respectful tones to this man two years my senior. “Balzac, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Dickens,” he answered without hesitation.
“Not exactly fashionable.”
“That’s why I read them. If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”
This took me off guard. “How can you say that?”
“’Cause it’s true. I know. I can see it. It’s like we have marks on our foreheads.”
The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.
Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin?
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from the broken vessels
As far as I can see there is no land
Oh my God, the water’s all around us
Oh my God, it’s all around
Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin?
Lords of war just profit from decay
And trade the children’s promise for the jingle
The way we trade our hard earned time for pay
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
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