Who Moved My Cheese?

Has anyone noticed that 1/3 of the country has seceded from the United States?

Oh, they left already. No, they didn’t leave a note.

They just up and broke up with us. That love letter, “The Constitution of the United States of America”- they’re embarrassed by it, really.

It was mere infatuation. Stupid.

So they broke up with us.

I know- they were assholes. We tried to pretend, but it was an abusive relationship the whole time. So it’s over.

The problem is – they’re still here!

It’s like an old relationship, and now we are stuck with a roommate from hell.

They’re devising situations. Passive aggressive shit at borders. Stuff to just work your last nerve.

They’ve got the credit card and they’re maxing it out right now.

-Assholes! (I am truly sorry, Your Grace, Facebook, Meta, but it’s time to speak normally, finally.)

You read a headline everyday and throw down your stupid IPhone in disgust.

Secession. Ending the Union.

This was an idea floated by their bloated deity R Limbaugh, who, just before he croaked, suggested secession was “probably” the only course of action for the Red States. We just don’t have anything common.

Those doofuses down there lapped that shit up.

Yeah, Rush called for secession and then he took the easy way out, collected a medal, dictator-style, and then pffft he was gone.

So the Red States have seceded in all but name and flag, but certainly they’re kicking around new names for the country. And the flag will have no stars or stripes. Because most of those stars are “woke” stars and many of the stripes are Antifa.

But there won’t actually BE a country, as such. It’s going to be a sort of Europe during the Feudal System, except the Knights Errant are driving Teslas. (I have heard you can’t get those repaired.)

The peasants usually have an oversized truck which plays loud ersatz rock music and shines gloriously from idleness.

Other than that, time proceeds along the lines of the same old story: Religious crusade, swimming in the summer. Draft picks. TV.

Fortunately this is not going to work in November or at any other time.

They need us more than we need them.

Yes. It is the unspoken truth that the Red States can’t survive going Full-Amish. Nope.

This is the United States, where we will let you dig a hole as large and deep as you want to, and for you to presently jump or stumble into, because this is the Sweet Land of Liberty.

Damn it they moved my cheese!

***

Saving the Country, One Salad at a Time!

Note to self- (A public service announcement to me.)

I can’t save the country but I CAN eat more salad.

I’m worried.

Has the J6 Committee done a diet/exercise survey of the participants, as part of its important work?

To put a finer point on it: How many of us are bonkers most of the time from overconsumption of…everything?

I speak to and for myself.

I know: how can one think about salad when the roof has blown off the political structure of the Western world?

Is there a connection between rampant consumption and, well, the end of the world as we know it?

I’m talking about mental clarity.

I’m talking about romaine lettuce.

I’m talking about an optimal body mass index of your typical Proud Boys person.

-Hey, this is pretty good. Nice leafy green vegetables. Fresh cherry tomato. Why didn’t I think of this before?

I know I’ll backslide. It’s ok. A salad is a huge step for some of us.

Everything is an indicator of other behaviors, which follow naturally.

Salad may indicate mindfulness, and that awareness is perhaps an indicator of other behaviors. Maybe. Of course, I’m new at this. I’ve only been on this health kick for twenty minutes now.

That too is an indicator. One can begin to infer things from these impulses, if that’s what they are.

Like walking. A person that walks somewhere has a different outlook than someone who never walks anywhere at all. The air is sweet. And it’s ancient. All the molecules have been around for eons, and still fresh as a daisy. The air’s been there for millennia. So lucky, to breathe that breath of spring.

(I’m not talking about walking a safari to hunt endangered lions or elephants. I’m talking about a walk in the woods or just around the block; a non-aggressive saunter to nowhere, unarmed.)

I’d like to know from the J6 committee what the diet and exercise and mental health regimen were for the all participants.

It’s a public health crisis- authoritarian insurgency.

Can a person who is healthy in body, mind, and spirit destroy the country?

Perhaps. The Third Reich was full of health nuts, after all. But like here, the leader was basically on meth. So there’s that. And yes, the former president, lurking at his rallies- is definitely on something. Steroids, is my theory.

The mentality of consumption is the heart of the matter: the nature of its demand, the rage to satisfy, to get things regardless of cost or consequence- that kind of consumption. The kind that overrides good judgement, that steamrolls opposition.

Food. Sugar. Disinformation. Climate. Outer Space. Domination!

-A salad and a tall drink of water. I still don’t feel like overthrowing the government… Maybe this is working for me!

Covid taught some of us to slow down and be aware. To hold to mental health, for our own sake and to serve others. To uphold well-being, and to allay mistrust and misfortune.

And now here we are, preserving democracy for generations to come, from a basis of sanity. A healthy foundation. An appreciation of what I have.

One salad at a time.

We’ll get through this together.

Next.

I can’t clean up the landfill, but I can cool it with the plastic, already. (Just thinking ahead toward the Future.)

4/22

Glide Path (Memorial Day meditation)

I just did a random Wikipedia check to see which prominent Republicans in Congress had real jobs, worked with a diverse population, worked in businesses run by and staffed by women, exposed to stratas of society, and it’s not looking good.

My work life has been all women/ all diversity all the time.

But Cruz Hawley Greene Gaetz?

These people exhibit some pretty clueless behavior. You could say that perhaps they’re not even exposed to society. Not the society I know, of honest working people that are not on the glide path.

The first random Democrat I checked – just testing my theory- was a US senator, Chris Coontz. Just random, first politician that popped into my head.

Here:

“Raised in Hockessin, Delaware, Coons graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He received graduate degrees from Yale Divinity School and Yale Law School. He went to work as a volunteer relief worker in Kenya, where he had taken classes at the University of Nairobi, later returning to the U.S. to work for the Coalition for the Homeless in New York. He spent some time as a legal clerk in New York before returning to Delaware in 1996, where he spent eight years as in-house counsel for a materials manufacturing company. In the interim he worked for several nonprofit organizations.”

So. We have Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley on a glide path to law practice and top tier positions, and then a diverse Democratic Party and they really aren’t the same.

I hear people complain about “corporatist” politics and I really don’t buy it mostly. Of course the country has been conservative in my lifetime. Of course. It’s a corporate culture with very strict guidelines. MAGA doesn’t think so- but they are wrong.

(Maybe they just hate Social Security. That could be it. They think it means we are socialists. Duh.)

This was the nation that rallied to fight Fascism. It is still that country. It’s set in stone. The country you think is Far Left supported the Vietnam War. The country you say is too liberal invaded the Mid East. The country of elite unelected bureaucrats built a nuclear arsenal. The country barely grudgingly consented to give women the vote, and resisted granting them economic opportunity, even into my lifetime.

These are not the behaviors of a libertine society on a freedom binge. No, we are conservative as hell, with tax cuts every decade to prove it.

But the Democrats have a moment to make history again. And they’re doing that. Biden is quietly steamrolling forward and he doesn’t need an ego boost every minute to know how. He knows how huge this moment is. And Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and the whole MAGA crew have so little to offer, for all that education -and misinformation.

We have to save Social Security. Protect LGBTQ+ fellow Americans. Restore human rights. And yes: correct the errors of the Supreme Court (for judgements that are truly outside the corners of the Constitution, so cannot stand up to the already established working standards of human rights in the year 2023.)

History.

We have this opportunity because of sacrifices of others. It’s Memorial Day. So grateful. So appreciative. Silent observance for a moment.

And then excitement about the country facing deep political challenges. And coming out better than ever before.

postscript-One final difference btw two parties: Joe Biden’s first order that I’m aware of was to his staff: he told his staff, publicly, that anyone he found treating others on his team in a disrespectful manner would be fired. And that is after years of Trump whose speech is completely unacceptable inappropriate and demeaning, and whose manner is parroted across the entire field. This just came to mind the other day. I think you’ll find it’s true. Biden so far has not minced words or wasted opportunities.

I Write Because I Have To Dept

…Ok I can’t sleep and it’s Easter but there’s nuthin I like better than a good Clarence Thomas scandal so…

“What the Fuck Clarence Thomas?”

an essay on the quality known as Self-Respect

What the fuck, Clarence Thomas?

You have been challenged by a controversy that goes to your very fundamental integrity.

Millions in gifts and “friendly hospitality”?

“Friendly hospitality”? What is this? “Petticoat Junction?

This is really bad. You’d been cut. It’s gross.

And what do you do? You make an excuse? A lame-ass excuse? You didn’t know better?

You asked your friends? Your “colleagues and others”? Because you didn’t know taking gifts might be something you might have to disclose?

You didn’t know better?

What is this? An episode of “Leave it to Beaver”?

Clarence Fucking Thomas. This is your big moment- unless you’ve checked out utterly in your swirling toilet- bowl flush into absolute Fascism, (which I believe you have.)

Meaning you do not have to think. At all. Just check the box, for the Society you belong to.

-Wrong!

This is huge and hugely important. This thing about corruption.

You are in it.

It’s like poker. Well, I confess I do not know how to play poker but let us say it is like “movie” poker, in the sense of old westerns and heist films.

Every player is staring over their hands, cards fanned out under a hanging bulb, eyeballs staring out from under their visors and hat-brims. Tension is building.

Someone puts a challenge- lays down their cards, shows their hand.

A publication exposes what looks like massive corruption -by you.

And in such a situation, what Clarence would do, metaphorically IF (and I do mean “if”) he had self-respect, and concern for the public, and a modicum of insight (for what justice lacks insight?) would be to “see” that hand of poker and raise the stakes. By being honest and brilliant and authoritative.

You would be honest and direct and brilliant and forthright and correct and demolish any criticism of yourself with your absolute integrity- which you, Clarence, could easily do, because you have ALWAYS acted with absolute integrity. You, Clarence, would provide examples. They are numerous, myriad. Plus you are obligated to do so.

If you, Clarence Thomas, had authentic self-respect, as well as respect for the Public you swore an oath to serve, you would stun the public with an unambiguous review of your decisions, demonstrating your depth of knowledge, your even-handedness- (for what is Justice, anyway, if not even-handed?), your commitment to the vast enterprise of upholding the ethos of the Constitution of the United States, in all its genius, with all its ethical implications, in its miraculously intricate scheme, of balancing all the powers of the Federal Government with the hierarchy of human needs expressed through the Rights of a Free People.

You would never be bothered again.

But no. You lack all of those qualities.

You lack good judgement!

Clarence Thomas utterly lacks good judgement.

And is sitting on the bench of the United States Supreme Court.

He lacks good judgement. ( Did I just say that? Oh well. If I repeat myself, I repeat myself, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would say.)

Or as the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would say-

Never mind. Clarence doesn’t really give a shit about what Holmes- or anyone else- has to say, I don’t believe.

“Insecure and wielding absolute power looking for same.” That’s Ginny and Clarence.

We know what we need to know about the justices on the court. They know themselves.

The egomania can’t disguise the self-hate among the right-wing judges, black and white.

Clarence. You could be the greatest justice in history or, at a minimum, at least, outstanding -if right now you yourself stood on principle and cleaned up the court, urged reform, raised the standard, rejected opportunism in favor of true justice.

But we are weary and long past urging and ahh.

Some day you may just have to step down.

If your friends will let you.

***

The Antonin Scalia Memorial Pool of Bad Judgement

…High dive competition: Supreme Justices compete in the Justice Antonin Scalia Memorial Pool to see who has the most outrageous technique in the Olympic Bad Judgement Category:

First in was the Chief doing one double twist screwdriver of bad judgement right into the pool. The Mrs was standing poolside and is completely soaked! Did everyone see that? Amazing!

Next Clarence Thomas did a flailing floundering belly-flop of bad judgement, with a splash-out and all the bystanders are hit with a massive wave and then …he climbed the ladder and did it again! There’s nothing subtle about his performance. The crowd has moved back from poolside.

Next here comes Gorsuch. He’s steady, good form, and then does a tricky backflip into a pike position of bad judgement and that may be a winner. He looks confident that he has perhaps the worst judgement. We shall see.

Here’s Amy. She’s looking nervous, stands at the edge of the board but wait- she looks like she’s praying and just leans over and drops like a potato into the deep end of the bad judgement pool. Wow. It was a failed attempt at the classic cannonball. She’s coming up for air now. She needs a towel and a hug.

Now here is big Sam Alito. He’s on the high dive and he’s sitting there- drinking a snifter of wine. Wait he’s got friends up there on the diving board and they’re having a picnic up there. He’s shaking his head like he’s not going to perform his dive of bad judgement- Wait! there he goes! Uh oh , looks like he’s having trouble with his suit! Uh oh, we’re losing our picture-

We are back. Yes that was totally bad judgement!

It looks like all the justices performed with Olympic bad judgement all around!

Scores: 10!

Oceanic

The following was a spontaneous reaction to the tragedy of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the loss of Flight 93.

(in progress)

Before the world blows up there’s just one thing I want to say:

I never liked the song “Georgia On My Mind.”

In fact, I can’t stand that song!

Had to get it off my chest.

Also.

“White Bird” by Its a Beautiful Day. Hated it.

I never liked The Rolling Stones. At all.

Also, “The Way We Were”
performed by Streisand was a blight on the music landscape. So were disco BeeGees.

Also:

The Theme From Mash. Godawful.

Hey this feels good.

While I’m listing the songs I hate, I’m making room for the idea that it really is time to abolish nuclear weapons- and I believe it is now possible. It must be.

Boz Scaggs’ “Lido.” I want to scream. But I do feel better.

“Wonderful Tonight” by EC. Oh hell no.

“Bat Out of Hell”- Meatloaf. I may push the button myself. Awful. But I want to live. With all the beautiful bugs and flowers.

“Inagaddadavida” -Glorious. Play it again! Before they drop the Big One.

Essay. Great Wall of Trump

“Parts of Speech: Words TV Memories and Kafka on the special occasion of a presidential address.”

Americans,

…is it a great “Great Wall’? Or The “Great Great Wall’?

Or just a really great, great wall? But why only two “greats”? It should be “The Great Great Great Wall!” Then he could say “the totally Great Great Great Wall” -so its greatness would be completely beyond dispute.

Because someone in the press would certainly write, and a kazillion people would tweet, that the wall is not that great, really. And make the wall look tiny.

The ‘really Great Wall’ line reminds me of when, in early days of TV, the famous Ed Sullivan would open his variety show with a monologue of patter and he would always say “We have a really great ‘shoe’ tonight” -he would elide the syllable of the word ‘show’ and it was a laugh line for impressionists. Not the painters, but the show biz imitators of famous voices. Oh, they don’t do that any more. Ok.

Ed Sullivan was famous for introducing new performers to the American audience. He introduced Elvis on his TV debut, but there was an uproar about his dance moves, his “gyrations”. I know, in America, Land of the Free.

Ed Sullivan also introduced the Beatles but eventually there was an uproar over them too. One of the Beatles noted, correctly, that they were more famous than, well, you know who (Jesus Christ) and again Americans freaked out.

Americans freaked out about the Beatles and built a bonfire of Beatles records and teen magazines and figurines and stuff- an example of freedom of speech. The signs said:”Beatles Go Home!”

Also featured on the Ed Sullivan Show was the mouse puppet Topo Gigio.

Topo would perch on Ed Sullivan’s shoulder and say “Eddie, Keesa me goo’ night!”

Everyone knew those lines from Ed Sullivan , just like SNL today.

So last night, when the president said “we’re going to build a great great wall” he must’ve known it sounded like Ed Sullivan. Which is funny.

And of course there already is a Great Wall, which doesn’t relate to the American imagination at all, so somebody might get confused. And that wall was like China’s Big Dig. It symbolizes a project that takes a long time and a lot of effort and resources. Perhaps a million people dropped dead making that particular wall, they think. Not sure the speech writers really thought this through.

The writer Franz Kafka- not a great American- wrote a story called The Great Wall of China, in which he lays out the tremendous challenge the construction would present. From childhood the workers were indoctrinated, thus:

“I still remember very well how as small children who could hardly walk we stood in our teacher’s little garden and had to construct a sort of wall out of pebbles, and how the teacher gathered up his coat and ran against the wall, naturally making everything collapse, and then scolded us so much for the weakness of our construction that we ran off in all directions howling to our parents. A tiny incident, but an indication of the spirit of the times.”

The work of Franz Kafka can inform in this context, in an era of authoritarian fervor, in which the policy of torture is openly proposed and promoted and promulgated, and incidents of antisemitism in the US are increasing. Though he died in 1924, Kafka’s writings of torture machinery and hunger and desperation and cruel humor prefigured the horrors to come in World War ll, and the Holocaust, and the almost insurmountable challenge to the Human Spirit, if there is such a thing.

…Of course, there is the Great Wall Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown, so if you google the presidential Great Wall you might end up there. You’d get stuck on Yelp again though -which really is the Enemy of the People, in my opinion.

So does a great wall preserve an open society, or just make things impossibly confusing, philosophically? Should the wall last for centuries or merely exist as an idea and a cultural artifact? Should it be visible from space? Does the Wall destroy the freedom it is meant to protect?

We could turn to Jean Paul Sartre- not a great American- whose novel The Wall may inform our current dilemma…

jk 3/1/17

Remembering David Crosby.

The Posse

Or, 13 Views of If I Could Only Remember My Name.

1. There’s an entire room in my psyche devoted to the Remember My Name Sessions, David Crosby’s 1970 solo collaboration with -everyone.
2. Everyone is there. David, Jerry, Neil, Paul Kantner. Rita Coolidge. Captain Manyhands. Graham. The Deja Vus. Mr Barnhard. Joni. John B Sebastian. Everyone. (People that were never there, are there, too.) But Jorma. Grace. Jack. They’re there. Jackson Brown and his gang of Eagles, Desperados. Playing dead on Main St, in a false front western ghost town.
3. It’s The California Posse. A round- up for daguerreotype. They all rode in together, making tremendous clouds of dust and the dust is gold and the saloon door’s open and everyone is high and-
4. did you hear Jerry Garcia’s impromptu pedal steel, stratospheric, nuanced, perfect sublime? Laughing. In the sun.
5. Did you hear John B Sebastian, filling in a spare, pure, resonant four measures of harmonica, on “Deja Vu” bringing it home? He’s there. It takes everything to perform three sliding notes in the right place at the right time.
6. There’s a lot of lift and nuance in those solos. These are pinnacle moments. These are what people take drugs to achieve. High points. Peak experience. To me, these sessions are the unmistakable sublime.
7. Jack Cassady’s ground-of being bass thrumming, vibrating the floor boards. Neil Young’s “Music is Love” backing vocal, straight out of the old hearse and wide across Mill Valley, and the gorgeous reverberation trailing from it.
8. Joni and David singing like angels on a Saturday night, in high spirals, effortlessly inventing every moment.
9. This is the California sound. We own it. I can see Mt Tam from my window. I see it every day. The album must be seen in context, and the context is me. Inside me.
10. So those sessions are ongoing. I can drop in whenever I feel like it. It’s always the middle of the night, the wee hours, when late night radio jocks put a needle in the groove and go for a smoke and it’s just you and this hippie jam thang, with the Crosby/Nash/Jefferson/Dead/ Band of Eagles.
11. Joni reminds us they INVENTED this work. The “singer/ songwriter” didn’t exist before. The songwriter/performers, solo-in-society. Newly minted. Stamped, certified authenticity.
12. David Crosby. His pals. They developed what had never been heard before, nor had even ever been thought of.
13. Who knew 12-string guitars shimmer? Who knew that hand-claps are of equal importance?- they resonate; you hear the room. You can hear the acoustics of the space. It’s so real! Wooden Music, they called it. And Gold Rush. And Canyon. And the Haight. The Haight Fricking Ashbury. When the Beatles got famous- they came here.

Music is love. Oh fuck I’m grieving.

So David, I know where paradise is. You are there.

***

Love me some sepia- toned folkology.

Grateful I grew up in an era with a booming music tradition of traditional music living room hoe down and Irish pub, with a hammering dulcimer and fiddles and whatnot nearly every night of the week.

Music documentaries are the only thing I watch anymore and I’m more likely to play a Beatles tune or a Jackson Browne or a Neil Young tune myself than to play a record. And that brings it full circle. That’s my folk music really.

Beatles are almost folk tunes now. They are so great so folded into culture that even an amateur can rock the shit out of Eight Days A Week or Ticket to Ride right out of the book.

But these come out of the dark cauldron of the folk music and art school weirdness of an earlier era. Old Modes. Church modes. And modes more remote still.

The British Folk are in a zone of their own, and many contended for non-invasive folksiness to no avail. Established Tradition and scorned innovation. Unlimited, within certain limitations.

From beatniks and bongo drums to advanced musicology, most research came from scratchy vinyl borrowed from the public library on the hill by the water tower across the street from the cemetery where the town dignitaries are buried; two hundred years ago they heard some of these airs sung without amplification.

I borrowed the Harry Smith Anthology of Folk Music with that astounding book of notes and its multiple records and loved the Cajun fiddle tune and “Old Blue” and I learned one tune (“Cindy”) on the banjo bought for $60 from Gary Peacock’s musical instrument shop across from Cafe Flor where all the stringband musicians hung out. Straggly- haired post-hippie hangout in the seventies.

I played that thing on the back porch in the Haight, using Pete Seeger’s “How to Play the 5-string Banjo” book. A treasure.

My theory is that my sixties pop composers have launched their pieces into eventual half- remembered folk music as well.

The melodies aboard the Voyager spacecraft are far beyond our heliosphere now. Some far-out being, light-years away, will reverse engineer a Woody Guthrie tune and unlock a key to what, exactly?

Who knows?

Some trite old thing pulled up from the deep well of my being.

The tunes are immortal. That’s what will last. Nothing is ever lost really.

Music making is pre-TV. It’s Neanderthal. It’s the old ways.

The books are written and the music is out there more than ever, the Home Version.

Yes, sometimes you work on a thing for hours and hours and hours. That’s great, too.
These artists were virtuosos in their realm.

I do love that people gathered to learn and cheat and steal and make mistakes. I saw that in the seventies in living rooms etc. – Classical traditions are way too perfectionistic. You need to wail sometimes. Fuck that shit up and then await the perfection of an afternoon when you play it good. It’ll sound like you.

Donovan is a god! True.