Vet.

I talked to a long-haired hippy not-altogether there Vietnam vet today. He lives in my apartment complex, and I've said hi to him before, but never initiated conversation. He's locally famous for wearing pajamas wherever he goes, and he walks everywhere. He also almost always has earphones in his ears, attached to an iPod I would presume, and seems to completely be tuning out the world. I've seen him in the office, at the pool, out walking around, in Walgreens (a drug store... what do Brits call a convenience store with a chemist at the back where you can get some groceries, toys, gimmicky things, some tools, fill your prescriptions, and so on? There must be those types of stores there. They're about as large as full grocery stores usually, but as I mentioned the product composition is different. You can usually even get bicycle innertubes, live bait, and motor oil there! And many are now open 24/7, for when you NEED your drugs at 3:30 am).

Anyway this guy is friendly but doesn't listen to anything you say, and says things on his own which are completely off the wall, and he gets a bus route map for Sonoma county every time he visits the apartment office (how many does he need?). But today he looked me (sorta) in the eyes and said, "No one's in command of those guys. You know that right?" I played along and first said, "Hey, where are your headphones?" He didn't seem to understand, so I elaborated, "You earbuds? You're always listening to music. Left them at home today?"

He had an inscrutable look on his face and said very lucently all of a sudden, "I - I have ringing all the time. You know, in my ears. All the time. I listen to music really loud because I need some relief sometime. That's what happens when you go into the army, see? You get a sergeant who is supposed to make all his men wear... those things... earplugs in your ears when you're on the rifle and artillery ranges. Well my sergeant, he, he said he was ordered to give us the option but then he looked us over as we stood in our lines and said, "but I don't believe in these things. Hell, war is loud, you sonsabitches. The way I look at it, you're entitled to wear this 'protection', but the whole idea of protection is for faggots. The way I look at it, anyone in MY command who needs protection for their little ears is a goddamn faggot. And I don't want any faggots in my command. But the Army makes them available for the little girls I guess so they won't complain later. So do whatever you want." I'm somewhat paraphrasing him, who I'm sure was paraphrasing the sergeant after all these years, but the gist of it is clear enough.

So now this poor, disaffected man who can barely hear and has severe tinnitus in both ears for the rest of his life, day and night, lives as best as he can, despite the institutional cruelty built into the system. "No one's in command of those guys," he said. I remembered that and asked him what he meant. He said when Dick Cheney is the Vice President and Bush the most powerful man in the world, and everyone all the way on down the line does what they say, what possible hope is there for fair or humane treatment at the bottom of the ladder? Then he laughed and said some catch-phrase from the Howard Stern show (apparently) and half-skipped across the street to god knows where.

Bands.

Is there a better debut album than Placebo's self-titled one? Well, there are, but not very many. I like the group a lot but their work, taken as a whole, puts them on the second-tier category for me. But if all their albums were like their first, they'd be tier-one all the way. The same goes for Suede, now that I think about it. Brilliant debut, followed by a string of good but somehow flawed albums. Compare both of these groups to Radiohead, whose debut album was just above-average except for the standout hit "Creep," and then the band topped it with a much more polished second effort, and the rest is history. Like the Beatles, from fairly conventional beginnings, they went on to completely define a new sound. When someone asks you what genre Radiohead (or The Beatles) are, you just kinda scratch your head and say... "Radiohead." Bowie has always done his own thing as well. Then there are groups whose sound always stays the same; they play it safe and stay with what works. Exhibit A: The Cranberries. Anyways, just some observations about what bands do after their debut album. This could be a topic that went on and on, but then I would lose my tiny readership entirely.

But for fun, can you think a good examples of bands that you like that a) Had a great debut album which they never matched again, b) Had inauspicious beginnings but grew to be a great band, and c) A band which always put out good material but never really pushed their creative frontiers? Be fun to see what people come up with.

FREE THE GRAPES!

※

“and tell us how you found out what no child should know...
tell us about the killing, Mary Bell.”

※

Cat of the Day!

A British Blue named Sonya.

Thanks to http://cats-life.com/

Thanks to Empath.

Radiohead. "Nude"
(Thom Yorke)



Don't get any big ideas,
They're not gonna happen.

You'll paint yourself white and feel all the noise;
There'll be something missing.

Now that you've found it, it's gone.
Now that you feel it, you don't.

You've gone off the rails...

So don't get any big ideas,
They're not gonna happen.

You'll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.

"Used Books"
by Sarah J

I like them dog-eared and lawnsoft,
and savor the character of winestain
and thumbsmudge,

the tear-warp between pages,
scrawl lolling down margins,

x's, question and check marks
scratched out as anchors.

They kindle affinity with readers
who've leafed through before, house

a kinship of signatures, conjuring towns
and streets in states I'll never visit.

They preach the economy of timber
and purses, while scribbled dates

evoke evenings spent couch-lounging
through past springs and winters.

Though they come off the press crisp
and unsullied, I like them used

for the gust of tinder and sawdust,
the waft of feathers adrift in a hayloft.

I turn the yellow hem of the pages,
a hue half neon, half tubercular,

like the wallpaper of a motel
nicotine-thick with confessions

where with the fray, I find repose
under covers well plumbed
and sepulchral.

I'm going to take an online test enabled by a code from a book I've had for a few years now, and am finally getting around to addressing. It promises to identify my 5 top strengths out of the 37 they recognize, and then I need to refer to the book to read about how to develop these strengths so they can become 'force multipliers' and land me a job where I am happy and feel fulfilled and champagne will rain down from the heavens.

The premise of the book and quiz combo is that it's a waste of time working to negate your weaknesses, as most popular self-improvements would have you do. Instead, massive Gallop studies have shown the most 'successful' people in virtually every industry got where they did by going in a direction they were already above-average, good, or even excellent in, then developed themselves in that direction even further.

In this age of specialization, that seems rational, as long as success is defined as a niche which makes one more happy or content or fulfilled that he or she currently is. And I just started this sentence with a conjunction after ending the last one with the most passive verb in existence, 'to be'. I also just put a period outside a single-quote mark. I guess I'm feeling rebellious today - I wonder if that will come through in the online testing...

I'll report back what the test and analysis had to say about me when the deed is done. Maybe it will give me some kind of extraordinary new insight on my life.

Good fan vid of Morrissey song




Morrissey. The Smiths. Asleep.

Jeff Buckley covers Morrissey




Morrisey's original with The Smiths

Darfur
http://www.ushmm.org/maps/projects/darfur/

Global Warming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAbATJCugs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9pHy_Uz5g0

Get on with things.

Long in the tooth.

The first thing I have to do if I am to do anything further at all is to take out all the trash. You've no idea what it is like to live like I do. If you do then God help you. And if he does, put in a good word for me. I'm not devout but I'm stout. I would have been a Templar, a warrior for Christ or some other noble sounding idea. I'd never be a bald eunuch monk denying myself everything.

But maybe that's exactly what I need. I'm growing longer in the tooth and so confused. There is a warm, dry breeze coming from the southwest that feel so good. Help me.

The first thing is to take out the trash...

I kill ... I wound ... I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh.
-God, from Deuteronomy 32:39-42

Helluva protagonist isn't he!

Dreamt of Akkadia

The person given the name Justin
Subjectively at birth is not here right now
But someone speaks for him
Or, more to the point,
Through him.

Swept up in a southwesterly wind
Like a plague of locusts I fly
The man with a hundred names I dive
Through the pores of your skin
But don't let me in.

Some are driven over and over
To stare me in the eyes, in the mirror
Hanging on the bathroom wall
Or to let me crawl over them
When they are sleeping.

These robes hold a hundred faces
And not one of them is true
I Am the truth, made brick after brick
Of lies, I wear disguises to hide
This fact from you.

Don't go looking in the dark places
Don't start tempting fate
When you've seen the best and brightest
Fall and be taken
Don't let your mind so easily break.

pazuzu

save me please i feel like i am in a hell beyond words

amaimon

boy who missed the sun
archangel
bent like a saddle inside
you missed the all the stars
you should have seen them
fell off my chair
there are no more colors
black obelisk disk
adorns my sky

at times i've seen you from the ground up
up in the heaven full of smoke
at times i've see you from the ground up
you make the choice
i'll see you someday
when the black disc no longer
obscures my eye

Thinking

When I was a child
I almost thought myself into insanity
And I grew up embattled still
When things tend to curl up into nothingness
Or fly off into infinity
My mind goes wild
And becomes unsettled
And why shouldn't it? It was never designed
For thoughts of this nature at all
At some point I just stopped ramming my head against the wall.

With clever mathematical tricks and
With ships we saw just how big our planet is
With telescopes we see how insignificantly small we are
Gliding around our mothering star,
In the face of larger and larger-scale structures
From our solar system to galaxies, to clusters of glaxies
And even supercluters that draw the bubble-and-void lattice
Of an entire unfathomably huge universe
Which may be only one of many "verses"
In the epic poem called everything.

With a microscope we saw life beyond the grasp
Of our naked eyes, worlds within drops of water,
And cells within this life, life of its own
Which had once upon a time roamed freely
And even within the organelles there are proton pumps
And stranger things still, all made of molecules,
Which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks
And muons and neutrinos and things which only
Atom smashers and computers can now convey to us, and
Mean anything only to a learned, priestly few.

Maybe science doesn't march towards an answer
Make endless predictions that will lead one day
To an 'equation that fits on a t-shirt,'
Describing the smallest and the largest with the
Same unbiased use of objective, nonarbitrary laws
Maybe it's not a matter of unpeeling all the layer of the onion
To see what lies at the heart of the onion,
If the onion simply unpeels forever
And at each stage grows a factor stranger and less meaningful
To these brains which evolved for communicating
And seeing depth well, so we could hunt big game

Maybe science doesn't have any meaning,
Any answer, any end at all, or one that we can ever get at;
Maybe it just becomes too hard to understand.

It's a return to basics
Even if you remove the fear
Of the floor falling out,
Of being along in an unfamiliar place
All of the questions remain

I find myself spending so much time
In this constant strain of trying
To keep my mind intact, and tiring
While it tugs at its sutures
And wants to explode

So when chemistry turned into physics
And physics became cosmology
And cosmology turned out to be philosophy
I quickly retreated from that
And compelling as the road seemed

Then I turned to ancient societies
And basic biology, which leads
To cognition and consciousness
On one end and back to chemisty
At the other, and I ran for cover

Now I'm filling my time learning about
Rocks, because rocks seems so harmless
I know they contain unsolvable mysteries
Once you break them apart, or speculate
Upon what they contain, or when you're gone

Will the rocks still remain?
But my brain is too smart to be that smart
I've done my best to learn how to be dumb
And to have fun with something less than
Fundamental, and preserve my sanity

For awhile longer, if only a little.

I am not free.

Listening to old music makes me feel strange
Don't talk to me about time in decades
It used to be about single years, which was best
And which was next; but now it all seems meaningless
With the darkening of age

It's not that the world is beneath contempt
I just don't understand it much anymore
And I've gotten so used to the feeling of stress
That tranquility's an unreachable shore
And still every day bring more

So let them burn their fires down on quarter-mile
And if you get a chance light one for me
Cause I've been grabbed by the chest like all
The rest, in the river of time to go
Where all men go. And no, I am not free.

Those who seek to destroy me when I try
So hard just to remain afloat
Will they find their peace when the goat's been slaughtered?

And you who would stone a deaf, dumb, and blind man
Would you cast the first stone
At a man who is losing the use of his mind?

People speak so openly of mental difficulties these days
But most people are deeply prejudiced
And also deeply resentful, misguided, and afraid

Like when the Irish came into their town, then
The Blacks. And then women became equal and there was
No turning back. And yet I sit and beg and still I am attacked.

Leave me alone for good, I ask you.
You've done nothing but hurt me all this time.
Can't you see that? Just look, don't listen to me.

Just look at me! Then go away!
Night and day I suffer,
Please don't hurt me anymore.

no such thing
(cornell)

I saw a world that was beautiful
but the rain got in, and ruined it all

then I tried to be invisible
it was impossible, even for me

I laughed at love; it was a big mistake
in the absence of, I filled it with hate...

cause there's no such thing as nothing
there's no such thing as nothing at all

I had the brains not to think at all
but the rain got in, and I thought too hard

on the world, and as usual
I saw too far into the void

I tried to make everything meaningless
but the rain got in, and made it a mess...

cause there's no such thing as nothing
yeah there's no such thing as nothing at all
yeah there's no such thing as nothing
but my finger's on a trigger
that'll turn off the world

so what gives me the right
to think that I could throw away a life?
even mine

and what makes you believe
that you could get away with getting old?
overlapping me

maybe to lose or to save your soul
is a choice of how you fill the hole

and the rain got in...

cause there's no such thing as nothing
yeah there's no such thing as nothing at all
there's no such thing as nothing
but my finger's on the trigger
that'll turn off the world.

You.
Beauty is a rare thing,
Maybe you know.
Was I to hold my coat above you
To show I was in love with you
In the rain on that night so cold?
Well love can be quite noisy
And awkwardness so silent
But the two can reverse their roles;
I just instinctively know,
That beauty is a rare thing and
It's everything about you I suppose.

Just some comments and questions.

Hello there, it's me, Sally. Just wanted to let people know I'm feeling better and less scared today and tonight. Thanks for the support I got from a couple people. It's infinitely better to have at least one person in your corner than to have no one.

I am going to try to post some happy things now, or more likely probably a mixture - a range of emotions as the saying goes. It's so hard to speak or write without using common phrases, to be totally original. In fact it's almost impossible. Try it! I try to avoid the worst cliches but I don't even do a very good job of that. My brother told me several years ago that two of his goals were to eliminate small talk and spoken cliches. Quite a lofty goal. I don't think he talks much these days ;-)

There are a lot of topics I could launch into right now and rant or rave about, so I won't.

Instead I'll do something similar to what I've done before but in a slightly different way. I'm going to present a numbered list of general types of posts I make on this blog, or ones which I would like to or are considering. Please respond, if you would, with a list of the numbers which interest you. You can just throw the numbers at me, or you can put them in order of preference, or you can put them in groups: 'most interesting,' 'somewhat interesting,' 'not interesting,' for example. It's freeform and all up to you. I just like to get a sense of where I should be steering this ship in order to bore people the least.

Here then is the list:

1. My poems
2. Others' poems - possibly with some commentary; what it means to me
3. My photographs
4. Others' photographs - again possibly with my reactions
5. Book, movie reviews in my own quirky style
6. Essays about politics and sociology
7. Essays about technology
8. Essays about philosophy
9. Easy to understand explanations of scientific topics
10. Animal wars; Movie wars; other tournaments
11. Pub quizzes
12. Questions, polls, and surveys for YOU to answer
13. Lists of all kinds - Like "My Favorite 20 ___"
14. Insightful or funny quotations by others
15. My own drawings and paintings
16. Drawings and painting by other that I find striking in some way
17. A pseudo-regular list of links to interesting web sites and stories
18. Song lyrics and accompanying videos or audio
19. Jokes or humorous Photoshopped pics (not mine, usually)
20. Things about me you probably didn't know
21. Monograms about obscure topics in history I find interesting
22. More "photo album" style casual/candid photos (as opposed to 'Art')
23. Stories I'll start and which everyone can continue in the Comments.
24. Recipes (not my own!!) which I find that look promising.
25. An "Ask Meta" regular feature. Advice, explanations, whatever.

Any other suggestions besides those given are greatly welcomed. Sometimes I'm at a loss as to what to post, and the endeavor can become a bit monotonous on both ends. That's maybe why I've a really slow few months. There are other reasons, but I want to make posting here a habit again.

Also: Should I change the design of this site (just the look, ignoring for now the contents)?
A) Drastically
B) Moderately
C) Subtly
D) Not at all

Thank you for patronizing the site and hopefully not me. I do appreciate every visit and comment I receive!

LYRA BELACQUA

from the movie The Golden Compass
played by Dakota Blue Richards

I thought she did great for someone with NO previous roles of any sort (movies, television, commercials); a true newcomer. And she was in practically every scene of the movie and had loads of dialogue, which she handled with intensity and enthusiasm. Also looked the roughly the way I envision her from the books. Her accent changed a bit here and there, but I didn't have much of a problem overlooking that. I hope she gets more roles in the future - she seems like a bright young lady and quite down to earth from what little I've seen of her outside of the film.

Lyras. There aren't many of them.

Ward 11

Damn it's getting hot in here
Fear is rising
Again
There seems to be a war on
And everyone wants my head
Should I poke it out even further
To see what is going on?
Should I stay hidden
I'm never going back to ward 11
Where predators prowl the perimeter
And jim took his hellish stay
And joe quickly escaped
And james had his life sucked away
Should I stand up for myself now
To be shot like a dog?
Should I retreat to try to find some
Comfort in the cracks between the rocks
Retreat further into my mind
That place which seems to beckon
But is never a salvation
I've followed the labyrinthine
Corridors of its neverending size
In dreams asleep and awake
For most of my life
It is an organ most unkind
But out there, the shells explode
And people seems to want
To do horrible things to me
And nature seems to have
Terrible plans for me
So my fear is rising
Again
As the perch of stability becomes
Ever thinner
And it's getting so damn hot in here
If only someone or something
Would spare me the decision
And make it quick.