GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST:

TODAY'S RANTLET

God is not dead; He's in a coma—a persistent vegetative state (No, children, that does not mean He lives in Florida). Patriarchal monotheism is the respirator that keeps the Sacred Heart beating and the Holy Spirit breathing. Men (Sorry, ladies, I'm leaving you out) don't need a reason to believe. They don't need reason to believe. They need to believe in order to have a reason—to exist, to justify their existence and their actions. Let me rephrase that. Men don't need a reason; all they need is an excuse. Rape, pillage, and murder go better with God. Now go out and pick some flowers and love one another.

THE MIRROR HAS BEEN EMPTY FOR TOO LONG

THE SAYINGS OF DR. OMED

Order is sterile. Chaos is fecund. I got my arms up and my knees tucked under the safety bar as the coaster train clanks up the first hill.

The breaking of symmetry, the invariant and unimaginable null, no-thing, or tao raggedly split into 1 and 0, yin and yang, is both genesis and fall, the coming of light and original sin, with pain, toil, suffering and death in its wake-but also joy and insight-is the first creative act of the mind. Truly is the prideful angel of our intellect in its cognitive disobedience called the light-bearer, Lucifer.

The question is (for the moment positing the existence of deity) not whether we have a choice (i.e, free will), but whether or not God has a choice. Cf. Einstein: "God does not throw dice."

There is but one God, and his Name is Legion.

God is not served at this establishment. Do you serve God? Supersized, with a biggie fries and a half gallon soft drink? Or as Jesus Tartare, perhaps with a nice Chianti?

While I enjoy the imagery of the Book of Revelations, I do not interpret it as a guide to history, past or future. When I do meet people who claim to be born again, saved, and what-all Christians, and hear their opinions on such matters, my conclusion has to be that all the best people go to hell.

Re: "all the best people go to hell." I don't believe in Hell, either. All the hell we create around us is self-evident; all the hell we create in the name of God.

And when in Hell is the Rapture going to remove all the revelatin' Christians from the Earth and let all us hopeless sinners get on with our tribulations without these busybodies mucking about in everyone else's beeswax? It's about two millenia late, this Parousia that Paul speaks of. "We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed..." Ya, right.

A trickster creator seems inherently more believable than a just god, a god of love. That our race commits theodicy with such abandon is the greatest of the Coyote God’s ort ort ort hey moe eye pokes.

"Revealed Truth" is a toxic material. Just say no to "TRUTH." As Bill Burroughs said, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

The process of evolution, biological or cultural, is not an onward and upward march of progress; it is contingent and value neutral, has no inevitable direction; we assign values and directions to it. As the historian Micheal Wood has said, in fundamental ways we are still stone age people. Still living out the archetypes of the first half million years or so of our specie's existence as stone tool using animals living in small "hunter-gatherer" troops. Nature is essentially female. That is why we call her Mother. The "matriarchy" in our genes generates female archetypes that represent, protect, and promote the biological evolution of the species by Darwinian natural selection. "Male" consciousness and ego rebels against the female surround and overleaps the biological world to dwell in the Lamarckian realm of ideas, propagating memes from mind, that will o'wisp in the wet, cthonian splat of brains, to mind. The archetypes of the "patriarchy" that have driven "civilization" for the past ten thousand years began as an unconscious psy-ops against the domination of the Goddess. I respect and venerate the Goddess, but also value the tools developed by the "patriarchy." Jello Biafra said "If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve." I'm an outlaw. I choose to evolve. What was your question?

I wonder how you say "We are Devo" in Arabic?

Sometimes it is not hopelessness, but hope that defeats you. The truly hopeless have no fear.

I am not a brave man, I am clinically fear-impaired. As part of my bipolar disorder, I simply do not feel fear in situations in which any sensible person would be terrified or at least a bit nervous. I do not mean I am fear free, I have learned some proper fear over the years, but mostly I feel fear in entirely innocuous and inappropriate situations. The only time I am truly afraid is when something bad is happening, or about to happen, somewhere else to somebody else. I had the fantods about two weeks before the London bombings, but I only knew it was about returning, in a new form, to the barbarism of human sacrifice like the Aztecs cutting the hearts out of thousands of victims to feed their gods. I didn't know the stone knife would rise and be plunged into our hearts so soon again. The suicide bombers have fed their god. Now, in what ritual of death shall we feed our god in return?

Ask not for whom the black helicopters land, they land for thee.

Lex orandi, non lex credenda: Listen up, Pilgrims. Religion is applied ignorance. Righteousness is applied insensitivity. Perfection is a kind of hatred.

Faith in God is heresy. The infinite has no will, no intention, no desire, no thought, no speech, no action—yet there is nothing outside of it. Attributing mind and will to "god," attributing divinity itself, and the name "god" is heresy. Limiting your awe of the infinite by any conception or definition of "god" is spiritual idolatry. Unsheath your soul and cut away the heresy of God's existence.

Melancholy is certainly a much more satisfactory word than depression. Melancholy is what you feel when you have experienced the truth of life, depressed is what you get when you can't face the truth. Melancholy is not debilitating. It impels and informs the act of creation. Out of great sadness melancholic imagination creates great mercies, and gives grace.

Poets, our hearts are full of holes to let the tears run out, so they won't burst.

The last illusion is disillusionment.

I think of regret as a kind of hubris, laying claim to what properly belongs to what I shall refer to for the sake of brevity as "God." Not that I'm necessarily against hubris, it's taken the human race a long way.

Don't you think all kingdoms are first kingdoms of the eye, which always seizes more than it can grasp? Sandcastles, pryamids or hermit's hovel, the ouroboros circles them all. It is not God the Father's house but the eye which has many mansions.

I don't know about you, but I begin to get the wind up when someone starts talking about what poetry really is. Poetry, like life, has no meaning. The poet (from the greek word “maker”) creates meaning. Trivial or profound. Like most everyone else who calls himself a poet (or for that matter the degenerate verseslingers who call themselves “spoken word artists”) I think I'm writing the really real poetry.

In poetry or art I don't think you can say anything more than once, no matter how many times you (or somebody else for that matter) repeats it. Unless you create anew, at least a new tin can tied to the tail of the metaphor, you are merely borrowing a cup of froth from the cataracts of true download, to produce the sort of doggerel any noncognitive plagiarist can excrete.

The discourse of politics and religion demonstrates the mastery of rhetoric over reason; no "scientific" reform of this discourse is possible, nor perhaps desirable. I.e., if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen.

One hangover from being injected with Baptist memes as a child is that I believe the words really do matter, their content matters, and meaning matters. It's herpes of the mind.

Writing for a blog is the first time in my life I ever thought about having an audience for what I do. I can sort of pretend I'm a very idiosyncratic journalist for the purpose of producing parody and satire and commenting (ranting) on current events, but I can't write poetry or make art that way. For that, I have walk down the dark alleys of my mind praying for a lurking muse to mug me.

The cosmos envelopes us, but goes on without us, in cycles that we cannot change (except in an extremely local way) and have very little or nothing to do with us. We are neither cause nor effect, we are a byproduct, a second order phenomenon. The weather that passes through our souls but for little eddies we make is larger than us.

The Lakota have the word: "Hokahey." This is usually translated as "It is a good day to die." but the literal translation is "Stand fast." The day that we will run is not yet come. Stand fast.

Rule #7: Nobody said it would easy.

That'll do to go on.

THE REVENGE OF THE WHALES?

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Years ago, the sound of a boat sometimes spelled death for the heavily hunted sperm whale. Now, some of them have figured out, it means dinner.

Scientists recently realized that sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska zero in on boat engines to locate miles of fishing lines hung with valuable sablefish.

"That's the whales' cue," said Jan Straley, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast who since 2002 has helped lead the study.

Sperm whales don't tune in to just any engine noise to track what are essentially miles of sablefish shish kebabs. The endangered whales key in on the engines' sporadic bubbling as fishermen turn them on and off while hauling in longlines, the ongoing study said.

The work has led researchers to recommend some low-cost ways for fishermen to hoodwink the highly intelligent cetaceans.

The researchers estimate there are 90 male sperm whales feeding from longlines in the eastern Gulf of Alaska, part of the world's largest sablefish fishery.

The sweet, flaky flesh of the sablefish, long prized in Japan and Hawaii, is gaining popularity in the mainland United States, where it is listed on menus as butterfish or black cod. About 12.8 million pounds (5.8 million kilograms) of sablefish were hauled in last year from the eastern gulf, with dock prices that sometimes topped US$4 a pound (euro7.50 a kilo). Consumers pay $18.99 a pound (euro35.40 a kilo) for the fish at the upscale Fresh Direct food delivery service in New York.

Scientists found the sperm whales tend to feed on longlines in the late spring through summer, during the height of the sablefish season.

Sound receivers attached to the longlines recorded the loud clicks of chattering whales. Using the recordings, scientists found that whales dive shallower than normal when near boats hauling up the bottom-dwelling sablefish.

"The whale doesn't have to dive as deep to get its food," said Aaron Thode, an associate researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who is also leading the study, which is funded by the federally established North Pacific Research Board.

Sperm whales in the gulf have been plucking sablefish off the longlines - which are up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) long - for at least two decades. They also take halibut and, in one instance, lingcod.

Killer whales in the Bering Sea and Prince William Sound also plunder sablefish longlines. Sperm whales and other toothed whales, such as pilot whales, cherry-pick fish catches all over the world.

No one knows how many of the trendy gourmet sablefish have been snatched by the snacking leviathans. Fishermen and fisheries managers say the overall economic loss to the gulf's 410-boat sablefish fleet is probably low, but has increased in the past decade.

"A couple of times they completely cleaned us out, but usually they take just a few," said Steve Fish of Sitka, who has fished for sablefish in the gulf for 27 years.

Fishermen fear the problem could intensify as the endangered marine mammals increase in number and teach each other the techniques of sablefish rustling. Once a prime target of whalers, scientists suspect sperm whales are recovering in oceans worldwide, although there are no definitive population numbers.

"You didn't used to see them at all in the gulf, but they started showing up in the late '80s, early '90s," Fish said. "Now you can hardly make a trip without seeing sperm whales."

Thode and Straley's suggestions for fishermen include fishing earlier or later in the season, hauling in the line without changing engine speed, or making decoy noises with the engine to draw whales to a different area.

Fishermen said they will try the methods this season, but many believe the large-brained whales are just too smart.

"We try to get creative, but there's only so much you can do," Fish said.

Sperm whale study: http://www.seaswap.info/index.html

Via Spike, my personal news clipping service. He got it from peoplepc-online, an outfit I’ve never heard of… Truth or psy-ops?

WHALE SUSHI OR SOYLENT GREEN?

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - The chained Farley Mowat floats under police guard in Cape Town harbor, out of reach of the whaling ships its captain seeks to destroy.

For seven weeks, the crew of the tiny activist ship harassed Japanese whalers in Antarctic waters, chasing the hunters through icy seas.

Now, the Canadian-registered ship has been forced to rest.

Last month, it was detained on arrival in South Africa by marine officials who say it does not meet safety requirements.

The crew talk of a diplomatic conspiracy to shut their campaign down -- and as they wait, they muse on their latest high-seas battle.

The 657-ton Farley Mowat -- flying the skull-and-crossbones like a modern pirate ship -- stalked Japanese ships hunting minke whales through the huge waves of the Southern Ocean and eventually sideswiped the fleet's cargo ship.

"Every time we approached them, they ran. We kept them running for 4,000 miles and 15 days," captain and activist Paul Watson told Reuters from the deck of his black steel ship.

"We couldn't catch them, so it was constantly a hit-and-ambush type of thing," he says, proudly recounting tales of the whalers he has helped to sink and the damage caused to those that escaped.

A founding member of Greenpeace, Watson now heads the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which broke away from Greenpeace and believes in action rather than protests.

The Farley Mowat, named after a Canadian author known as an environmental champion, is Sea Shepherd's standard-bearer.

Article Continued ...

The Japanese are still hunting whales. For food. Whale sushi. In my book whales are sentient beings, and killing them is murder. Killing them for food is the same as killing a chimp or gorilla for food (as poor Africans are still doing) and is morally equivalent to cannibalism. Hell, it is cannibalism. It would be far healthier for the planet if there were a lot more good old fashioned mano a mano Homo Sock Puppet cannibalism. There's more humans on the hoof by weight than any other animal but ants and termites. Ants and termites are high protein but in most people's minds they do not qualify as the other white meat.

Excuse me for a moment.

“SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”

I feel better now.

Benighted creatures such as chickens and cattle only exist because we, the human race, created them, by selective breeding from wild ancestors over generations, and by genetic manipulation since yesterday. Their degenerated races continue only because we find them tasty and expeditious with biggie fries and a 42 oz pop, at the drivethru--and because the Agricultural-Industrial Complex makes billions of dollars selling the flesh of their carcasses to us. Also, they've got to do something with all that corn. The Green Giant can only sell so much creamed corn. If we as a race stopped eating domesticated animals, Tysons, The American Beef Council, et al., would stop raising them. Their populations would crash, leaving only remnant populations in zoos, and farm museums, and possibly some feral pigs and chickens. So remember, if you give up the nuggets and the Big Mac, you're on the road to genocide--genocide most fowl.

I've never raised an animal for food, but I have killed, cleaned, cooked, and eaten fish, birds, and small mammals. It is strange to make a living animal dead, have it die at one's hands in one's hands, and to divide a whole body into pieces of meat and waste. But the Bible lies; the mark of Cain is on the heart, not the forehead.

JAM-PACKED PLANET: THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Planet's Population to Hit 6.5 Billion Saturday

By Leonard David LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 24 February 200612:38 pm ET

A population milestone is about to be set on this jam-packed planet.

On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people.

Along with this forecast, an analysis by the International Programs Center at the U.S. Census Bureau points to another factoid, Robert Bernstein of the Bureau's Public Information Center advised LiveScience. Mark this on your calendar: Some six years from now, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the Earth will be home to 7 billion folks.

snip snip

On average, 4.4 people are born every second.

snip snip

Remarkably, despite the many new developments over the past 50 years, one fact looks very much the same: Populations are growing most rapidly where such growth can be afforded the least—an observation that has changed little over time.

Via LiveScience.com. Read entire article HERE.

THE UBER-GEEK YO-MAMAS

Yo mama's resting energy is her mass times the speed of ugly squared.

Yo mama so fat, her blue mumu looks like a red shift.

Yo mama's like an mp3—she's free, and everyone just passes her around.

Yo mama so fat, neutrinos stop and go around her!

Yo mama so fat, Stephen Hawking found three extra dimensions in her panties!

Yo mama so fat, she sat down at the Periodic Table—and Uranium got pissed off and left!

Yo mama made of Ugly quarks.

Yo mama so fat, when she go to the beach, Greenpeace tries to tow her back out to sea!

Yo mama's so fat, she's afraid that if she runs into Auntie Matter, they'll gravitationally collapse and create a black hole!

Yo mama so dumb, she thinks the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction is what happened right before she had twins.

Yo mama's so fat they have to draw her world-line with a paint roller.

Yo mama's so fat we can't even ASSUME she's a point mass.

Yo mama's ass is a quantum phenomenon—more wave than particle.

Yo mama is so fat, she don't have skin; she has an event horizon.

Yo mama so dumb, her IQ is an imaginary number.

Yo mama's so fat, her DNA is a TRIPLE helix.

Yo mama so dumb, she STILL thinks voting for Bush the second time was a good idea.

Note: Dick started it.

DR. OMED’S LATE NITE SERMONETTE

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS:
WHY THE HUMAN RACE CAN’T DO THE NUMBERS

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

Le superflu, chose tres necessaire—Voltaire*

Estimated number of people killed in the 9-11 attacks:
2,986
Average number of people killed
in auto accidents in the United States per year:
42,000
Estimated number of people killed instantly
in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945:
80,000
Estimated number of people dead
from the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing by 1950:
200,000
American soldiers killed (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
2,280
American soldiers wounded (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
16,653
Estimated number of Iraqis killed (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
28,000 to 32,000
British soldiers killed and wounded on the first day
of the Battle of the Somme in WWI:
58,000
Estimated rate of species extinct per year:
50,000
The total human population of Earth
projected to 02/23/06 at 03:39 GMT (EST+5):
6,499,416,902
Total increase in the human population of Earth
since the day before yesterday (2/20):
621,648
Total killed in six natural disasters aka Acts of God
(Southeast Asia tsunami; Sumatra earthquake;
Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Stan mudslide in El Salvador;
earthquake in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India;
mudslide in the Philippines)
occurring between 12/26/04 and 2/17/06:
491,120
Percent of total human population of Earth
represented by the 491,120 aforesaid victims of Acts of God:
1 five thousandth of 1 percent
Human population of Earth in 1918:
1,800,000,000
Estimated number of people dead in the 1918-1919 flu pandemic:
Lowball: 20,000,000
Highball: 40,000,000
(1.1 to 2.2 percent of the then current world population)
Number of people dead from AIDS since 1980:
25,000,000
(A much smaller fraction of the current world population)

If the H5N1 bird flu virus morphs into a form as virulent to humans as the 1918 influenza pandemic, killing the same percentage of the current total world population, the number of dead flu victims would be approximately 71,500,000 to 143,000,00. At the current rate of population increase, that number would be replaced in less than a year in the case of the lowball number and in less than two years in the case of the highball number. As I said in Dick Jones’ comment box;

We are the Plague.

But, collectively, the human race can’t do—or face—the math. We’re past due for the herd to be thinned. Speaking entirely metaphorically (Okay, Dick?), the H5N1 virus is just a little something Mother Gaia has simmering in a petrie dish on the back burner. Disease, natural disasters and the effects of climate change are not killing us fast enough. We aren’t killing us fast enough. Only a real bastard of a cataclysm, perhaps combining several factors will provide the economy of scale required. After all, it takes four horsemen, according to Revelations. Supersize that Armageddon.

Our species, except for termites and ants, is, pound for pound, the largest, most wide spread terrestrial source of protein rich food on Earth. I don’t actually believe in the Gaia Hypothesis, but I do put some credence in the process of natural selection. The founder mutation that creates a bug that can eat us wholesale will likely be very successful. We are not privileged to sit at the top of the food chain and root, hog, root ‘til Jesus calls us home. We are all tomorrow’s food. Soylent Green is people.

My simulacrum of the facts, ma’am, just the facts; my heapin’ helpin’ of lies, damn lies, and statistics may not be tasty with fries and a shake; feel free to collect your own, more palatable set. But you have to able to count past one...two...many. I do not regard my assessment, such as it is, a counsel of despair. I certainly don’t think we can kill the biosphere; I think maybe we should stop trying so hard to do it. We can..will…have impoverished the diversity of the biosphere to the point of creating a major extinction event, like the Permian or Cretaceous extinctions. Life on earth has all always come back, even from the worst extinction events, but tell that to the trilobites and dinosaurs. I don’t even think the human race will go extinct, but our descendents will likely live in an impoverished material civilization and culture, unless we make some big changes, right now. There are things we can do every day to make the future better, and to save what we haven’t already lost. I love the smell of burning bridges in the morning.

*"The superflous is very necessary."

Note: Dr. Omed would to thank Dick, Karen, and Meg for their inspiration.

ON SALE NOW

BUYING ARMAGEDDON


We're buying Armageddon because it's on sale at WAL-MART.
We're buying Armageddon because it only takes a couple of minutes in the microwave.
We're buying Armageddon because it has a three car garage and a Jacuzzi.
We're buying Armageddon because it whitens our teeth and freshens our breath.
We're buying Armageddon because it kills with one shot.
We're buying Armageddon because Jesus loves us yes we know.
We're buying Armageddon because it's made out of recycled materials.
We're buying Armageddon because we want to keep up with our Jones.
We're buying Armageddon because it has a lifetime guarantee and we'll never have to buy another one.
We're buying Armageddon because you can use it again and again and again and it never wears out.
We're buying Armageddon because you can download the free trial version from the Internet but you have to pay for the full version.
We're buying Armageddon because you can get it at the drive-thru and it comes with a free action figure.
We're buying Armageddon because we're collecting the set.
We're buying Armageddon because the extended version has just been released on DVD.
We're buying Armageddon because it's part of any good investment strategy.
We're buying Armageddon because it's wrinkle free.
We're buying Armageddon because it's not just for Christians anymore.
We're buying Armageddon because revenge is sweet but God's wrath is sweeter.
We're buying Armageddon because Armageddon means never having to say you're sorry.
We're buying Armageddon because we don't want to die

alone.

ARF!

CONFESSION

Speak, Grendel, speak.

Though my tongue has been cut out,
my native language beyond recall?
Its words, like the blows of a knout
in the hands of an expert sadist,
have left no outward mark;
no least bruise of palimpsest
on these old parchments,
that I wear like skins,
my costume for the auto-da-fe.

Speak, Grendel, speak.

My heart is full of owls;
my mother cached them there,
a chest full of knickknacks, paddywack,
she bequeathed to unsuspecting posterity.
My back is full of leather straps;
my father laid them on, hope he’s glad
he made the proud flesh so strong.
I am a monster. Wolves run in circles,
and bite themselves when I howl.
I gnash down the marrow
of long bones a song too large
for narrow ears.

Speak, Grendel, speak.

Dana Pattillo

DR. OMED’S SHORT FORM SERMONETTE

DO WE LIVE IN THE SHORT ATTENTION SPAN UNIVERSE?

Did you know, if your attention span was shorter than the Planck time, roughly equal to 1x10 to the -43 seconds, the smallest measurement of time with any meaning in our universe (the time it takes a photon the travel the Planck length, the smallest measurable unit of length in our universe, roughly equal to 1.6x10 to the -35 meters…lost you already, huh?) Anyway, if your attention span was shorter than the Planck time, you would disappear into a self-created black hole.

Trust me. This occurs when the neurons of your brain, due to a violation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, begin absorbing high energy addion particles (an addion is the fundamental quantum of distraction); when the wavelength of addion irradiation becomes shorter than the Planck length, your brain collapses past its Schwartzchild radius into a quantum black hole, and takes the rest of you with it down the wormhole, which is so improbable that it promptly evaporates. Essentially, you shrink wrap yourself into non-existence—at least, in this universe. Talk about collapsing the wave form.

Is that why we’re here? Is this the short attention span universe? Did we, as allegedly sentient beings, so abuse our intelligence that we developed attention spans shorter than the fundamental quantum of time in our home universe, and thus suck ourselves down the rabbit hole into this universe? It would explain a lot of things, you have to admit.

What was I saying just then?

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: THE CONSERVATIVE QUESTIONAIRE

Please try to answer the following questions as honestly as possible.

1—What do you think caused your conservatism?

2—When and how did you first decide you were a conservative?

3—Is it possible that your conservatism stems from a morbid fear of ambiguity?

4—Is it possible that your conservatism is just a phase you may grow out of?

5—Conservatives have histories of failure in personal relationships. Do you think you may have turned to conservative politics out of fear of rejection?

6—If you’ve never had an open mind, how do you know that you wouldn’t prefer that?

7—If conservatism is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients registered Republicans?

8—Have you disclosed your conservative tendencies to your friends? How did they react?

9—Your conservatism doesn’t offend me so long as you don’t try to force it on me. Why do you people feel compelled to seduce others into your socio-political orientation?

10—Should you choose to become a parent, would you raise your children with conservative values, knowing the mental, emotional, and spiritual poverty they would face?

11—The great majority of child molesters are conservative Republicans. Do you really consider it safe to expose your children to conservative Republican teachers?

12—Why do you insist on being so obvious, and making a public spectacle of your conservatism? Can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

13—How can you ever hope to become a whole person if you limit yourself to a compulsive, exclusive, GOP political orientation, and remain unwilling to explore and develop your normal, healthy, Goddess-given liberal potential?

14—Republicans are noted for assigning themselves and others narrowly restricted, stereotyped sexual, social, and economic roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role playing?

15—Why do conservatives place so much emphasis on sex and money? Do you support prostitution?

16—Shouldn’t you ask the fringe conservative types, like anti-abortion terrorists, NRA wingnuts, Limbaugh dittoheads, and Southern Baptists, to behave? Wouldn’t a little decorum improve the overall conservative image?

17—Could the human race survive if everyone became conservative and joined the Republican Party, considering the accelerated potential for world wide-cultural and ecological collapse, not to mention the menace of preemptive use of weapons of mass destruction?

18—There seem to be very few happy conservatives. Techniques have been developed with which you might be able to change if you really want to. Have you considered sex therapy?

19—Why do conservative Republicans hate or distrust so many other people? Is that what makes them Republican?

20—Why are conservatives so promiscuously religious?

21—Polls indicate that conservatives engage in sex less often than people of any other political persuasion. Isn’t possible that all you need is a good lay?

Dr. Omed prays for the conversion of Infidels and Republicans every day.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 6.21.04)

SIGN OF FOUR

I don't normally succumb to such memes, but Anne Penkill has seduced me.

SIGN OF FOUR

Four Jobs I’ve had:
1. Ice delivery man
2. Projectionist at an x-rated movie theater
3. Reading newspapers and tagging articles at the Denver Press Association clipping service
4. Journeyman (artisan) baker

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire
2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
3. Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus
4. Evil Dead II (or Army of Darkness, either one)

Four places I have lived:
1. Oklahoma City
2. Denver
3. Colorado Springs
4. Tulsa

Four TV shows I love to watch (not counting the news):
1. House
2. Twin Peaks (on DVD)
3. Millenium (on DVD)
4. Firefly (on DVD)

Four places I have been on vacation:
Baltimore
Washington, D.C.
New York City
Telluride, SW Colorado

Four favorite dishes:
1. My mother’s fried chicken and gravy (the gravy could be considered as a separate dish, but as my mother’s been dead for 28 years I feel I can sneak it in)
2. Vietnamese soup
3. Fresh shucked oysters on the half shell as served at Faidy’s in the Lexington Square Market in Baltimore
4. Whatever’s in the fridge at 2AM

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Salon recently updated blogs page
2. Salon rankings page
3. Referer rankings page for the Tent Show
4. (in aggregate) all my blogging boyfriends and girlfriends (as my wife Elspeth calls them) via my blogroll

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. The Burgess Shale fossil site in the Canadian Rockies
2. The Library of Congress rare book room
3. Central Park
4. On a four man raft on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon

RAIN BIRD

This is a frottage I did in Denver about 1992. I was wandering around talking to myself, making rubbings of anything that was relatively flat and had raised or incised shapes, patterns, or texture. The "rain bird" was a rubbing of the top of a lawn sprinkler. I offer it as the blog-image equivalent of a rain dance.

WEATHER UPDATE

Those promisingly dark clouds blew away. The temperature dropped enough that it felt like winter for a few hours. Today Tulsa had another sunny, breezy, warm Not-Winter day. We don't have Winter in NE Oklahoma anymore. We used to have Winter for about three weeks, but now we're down to a few days of half-hearted snow and sleet. Kyoto has some rain in its forecast, why can't we?

RAIN, RAIN, COME AGAIN?

I don't know that it matters to the wider blog-o-sphere, but it looks like it might rain here in Tulsa this morning. Oklahoma has been in a drought so long we can barely remember what rain is. Little drops of water falling from clouds in the sky, right? Makes the earth smell good. Yes, that's it. There's poetry in it, too.

ZEN JUDAISM

A bit of flotspam (or is it jetspam?) just washed up in my Inbox via the esteemed Dancing Elder Brother Dave:

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip... joy.
With the second... satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have? Bupkes.

The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.

And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance,
do the following: get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation
is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Torah says," Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self."
So, maybe you are off the hook.

The Buddha taught that one should practice lovingkindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain,
though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away,
yet shall you meditate and not stir
until you have attained full Enlightenment.
But, first, a little nosh.

BEST OR (TENT) SHOW: LATE NITE SERMONETTE

On the Appeal of Fragments and Loving Shakespeare Too Much

Fragments are often more tantalizing and evocative than an entire work. Many ruins look better bleached and broken than they did when new and whole. I think this is why reconstructions and restorations are so often unsatisfactory even if absolutely accurate. Restoration robs the ruin of its power to conjure the ages it has withstood, to ensorcell our imaginations as we walk among the the scarred reliefs and tumbled stones. Rock of ages, cleft for me.

Sappho beguiles us so because her work lives in fragments. In little mysterious phrases. "[ ] to melema tonon* [ ]" The transcriptions of papyrus and vellum fragments from classical times often have more brackets than words. All that austerely beautiful pentalic marble in the Parthenon was painted in bright primary colors, after the sculptors and stonemasons finished up. Giantess Athena tricked out in ivory and gold like a right tart.I say this even tho' I know our ancient heritage is being degraded by pollution, defaced or destroyed by fanatics and thugs, and loved to death by tourists. Preservation and restoration are absolutely essential. But when I held a broken piece of Etruscan pottery in my hand, or when I was walking down a little sandstone canyon in Nevada, and suddenly saw like a blind man regaining sight the petroglyphs on the walls all around me, weathered by time and defaced by vandals, that is when the ghosts began whispering up my spine.

Fragments appeal because we ourselves are great jumbled collections of fragments. The unity of human personality and memory is an illusion, and the part is often greater than the whole. The pseudonyms we adopt for ourselves in our blogs are the little fictions that belie the greater fiction that we are integrated unambiguous whole persons. If we don't have multiple personalities we have multiple personas, and we rearrange our mental furniture to suit the current passion play. Sifting the detritus and mementos of a stranger's life, whether at an estate sale or in the pages of a blog, is a way of trying on another history, playing all the parts in someone else's miracle play.

Our brains are built for pattern recognition, to an evolutionary fare-thee-well. Human beings are as overspecialized in this regard as cheetahs or impalas are for speed. This hardwired trait to seek meaningful pattern and integration is the driver of all religion, art, poetry, conspiracy theories and physics. It is a cruel joke we play on ourselves due to an endowment of natural selection, a gift of survival from our hominid ancestors. That is what I say, until I doff my reductionist's pith helmet, and put on my mystic's sombrero.

Since our nerve tissue extends to every part of our bodies, it seems to me that our minds are most likely conterminous with our bodies, and that congress of the confederated states of consciousness known as the self receives not just sensory impressions but thoughts from all parts of the body; not just the cerebral tissue, but from memories from muscles, meditations from the marrow in the bone. Most men have been accused of letting their private parts think for them at one time or another.

I have a weakness for using fragments, lines and phrases from Shakespeare (and other venerable bards and bardettes) as a kind of poetic shorthand for a particular mood or idea, and also a weakness for employing bible verses as a kind of punctuation, often at the end of a poem, as with the quote from the prophet Micah at the end of Lachesis. It's old fashioned to say so, but Shakespeare and the scholars who translated the King James Bible virtually invented the English language as we now have it, between them. Eradicating their pervasive influence from our language would be like removing the oxygen originally created by ancient cyanobacteria two and a half billion years ago from the air we breath. There are, however, several problems with my working tidbits of these titans into my poetry like a bowerbird insinuates foil and bits of ribbon into his palace of grass and twigs. The first difficulty is that people for the most part do not read Shakespeare or the Bible anymore. Many Xtians I know are surprised and appalled to hear some of the things I can quote chapter and verse from their "Good Book." I have been to many a poetry reading at which I heard a "pote" read a "pome" stuffed with tropes or conceits from Shakespeare or even Chaucer that said "pote" when questioned insisted that he (and mostly they were he) had just thought up himself ten minutes ago or the day before yesterday. I consciously write in these borrowed words as if I thought my reader or listener would immediately catch the reference when I know perfectly well it's not true in most cases. The second difficultly is that they are borrowed. Unless I can put a new twist in the tail of a scavenged word, phrase, or metaphor, I don't think I'm doing it poetic justice or my job as a poet. But I love my shiny bits of language I have stolen from the trash heap of human culture. That's third difficultly; I love them, too much.

*"The beloved one"

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 11.7.03)

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST

Readings from Martin Luther King:

Nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the world." And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.

God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power." And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.

The Drum Major instinct, 4 Feb. 1967

I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?"

I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism.

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

Where Do We Go From Here, 16 Aug. 1967

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us…

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions: We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

A Time to Break Silence, 4 April 1967

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: What is a Secular Christianist?

GRENDEL’S AZTEC BAPTIST CATECHISM:

What is a Secular Christianist?


A Secular Christianist is not a Christian per se, but a particular kind of Christian; a political Christian rather than a spiritual Christian. Not all Secular Christianists are what my Grandma would have called good Christian folk, if you judge them by their public behavior. I don’t even want to think about their private lives. But the Gospel and my Granny have told me that I have no call to judge. They certainly stridently identify themselves as “true” Christians, and they prefer to be in the judgement seat, not before it.

Secular Christianists are people who cross the line drawn by the First Amendment, because they think have a direct line to God Almighty, and seek to impose God—their idea of God, their “bible-based” morals, their particular version—and their peculiar interpretation of—the Word of God, on our designedly secular government, and our religiously—spiritually—diverse society.

Secular Christianists would like to teach the children of our country that United States of America is a Christian Nation, established from the very beginning on Christian principles by the Founding Fathers. The small t truth about our founding fathers and our nation is a whole lot more complicated than that, but Christianists don’t like complications. Their political principle—if not their motto—is “Keep it simple, for stupid”—for the credulous, the gullible, and the self-deluded.

White, black. Good, evil. Right, wrong. With us, against us. Secular Christianists like to feel that they are surrounded by enemies, and they want us, their fellow citizens to feel that way, too. I think it can be fairly and balancedly said that Secular Christianism as movement, with an assist from Al Qaeda, has succeeded in achieving that goal.

Secular Christianists believe in unity through fear and demonization of the other. They believe in terrorizing wayward souls into the arms of Jesus. Christianists believe in soul searching, but not their souls; they want to search your soul, your hard drive, your bedroom. Many of them are what I call Soul Arsonists, who work on the principle of destroying souls in order to save them. Secular Christianists find solace as well as salvation in the thrill of hellfire and the comfort of myriad enemies hugging them close.

Do you want to live in fear? They do.

I'LL SHOW YOU MY REALITY

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW SERMONETTE:
I’LL SHOW MY REALITY IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS
OR REALITY SHOWS VS. THE GROUND OF BEING

Dr. Omed has been venting his spleen in other blogger’s comment boxes. Dick Jones (Patteran Pages) and Sam Mills (feral) have suffered my remarks very kindly, and Sam provides His Loveliness a second home when my PC or my software is fubared. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my numerous sins of commission and omission.

Here is Dick’s post for October 4th:

“All art is abstract. Only reality isn’t because it isn’t art”. Emil Nolde

DISCUSS.

This quote has netted 23 comments last time I checked. One of my comments was:

"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony."* "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the "Ownership" class.

Like I said. Vent. Spleen. I would slightly revise that last line to read:

…support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the “Ownership society.”

“Reality” is one of those troublesome words, almost as troublesome as the word “love” (We’ll be getting to that). People tend to assume they know what the really real reality is, just as they think or rather feel they know what love is. People have no idea. I don’t mean that they have no idea what reality or love is; I mean they have no idea. Reality is whatever they see in front of them; whatever they choose to see. A lot of people have a TV or computer screen in front of them. Their reality, your reality, my reality, are all a combination of our perceptions and our creative apperception. The latter is the senior partner. We all have our little kingdoms of beholding. In our individual dominions our writ is absolute, but for the weather of the world, and the fruitful operation of chance.

Our reality is an artifact of our perception and self deception, what it is depends on how or through what we’re looking at it. To steal a phrase from Tom Stoppard, reality is its own alibi. Sort of like God.

From the ether I hear a question; something whispering this way comes: “So, what’s your alibi, Dr. O?” In the midst of the comment string appended to a bit of flotspam I posted to Sam’s Safe Haven for Broken Blogs, I generated a concise coda or creed that expresses my current alibi:

Many paths; one Way. The word may be god, but the word that is the word, the one word, the true word, the eternal word, as Lao Tzu said, cannot be spoken. It cannot be believed or disbelieved, because it is beyond belief. It cannot be acted because it is outside of action or inaction. It cannot exist or not exist, because it surpasses existence and nonexistence. As Meister Eckhart said, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Yet it encompasses us, and everything that was, is, can, or will be.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be passers-by." I have given a lot of thought to that phrase, to me perhaps the most important saying attributed to Jesus (certainly the most mysterious), as I have watched the terrible merciless beauty of "God's" creation and destruction go by as it carries me down the years to the terminus ad quem, the way station that is my particular destination.

Remember, I’m cherry-picking from my own comments (which is inherently unfair: click the comment string link above to read it all) but what I said made Meg feel besieged and invoke love as her defense, and also caused Sam to take me to task:

Doctor O, such responses as you give are analogous to flak bombs that deflect enemy radar. You quote and cite and lead astray while never addressing the issue at hand. All you say here is surely so. Who can say nay? Yet the issue is a professed lack of compassion which, as expressed, differs little from outright hostility toward an entire population of a region experiencing a dire emergency. So Lao Tzu me that, why dontcha?

My answer:

Sam, make that outright hostility toward an entire species, experiencing a dire planet-wide emergency due to its own collective bad behavior. A lot of us will have to die before the planet can get well again. That is not a wish, that is a fact.

There are many "me"s, the human personality is not unitary. One of me, out of the many, is an angry misanthrope. Having compassion for one's fellow creatures and loving one another as much as is possible is a great good thing, but we are not saved by our love and compassion nor can we save anyone else. All the love and compassion of the Human race put together is not saving the planet as far as I can see. What many people think of as compassion is a misapprehension of this waking world and its inhabiting spirits.

St. Paul at the end of Corinthians I chapter 13 says "Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love (agape'). I have no faith, and don't think we have much hope. That leaves love. I think detachment is more necessary to true love than compassion. Detachment is necessary to true love because true love is foolish, betrayed, hopeless, lost. True love is, as Galway Kinnell put it, "tenderness towards existence." The beauty of this world is without mercy, and I chose to live and love in it not only because it is beautiful but because it is merciless. I was not merciful 27 years ago when I lowered the barrel of the revolver from my temple and decided not to blow my brains out. Love is the most useless thing in the world, and the most necessary. Here's my combination: Compassion plus detachment equals love(agape'). Beauty plus the ruthlessness we call passion equals love(erato). Love(agape') plus Love (erato) equals Grace.

Sort of like singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I've heard Willy Nelson sing it that way.

Well, Sam thought I was still pumping blogiston on the fire, and posted a picture of a panda pissing up a tree to put it out. Among other things, Meg said:

Dr. O, I have to confess, and this is exceedingly difficult for me, that I don't really know what you were saying up there. It sounds like you see love and living differently than I do on such a grand scale that I can't quite wrap my brain around it.

Sam and Meg, I cherish you both. I want you to know that I expressed myself as honestly as possible without any intent of wounding either of you. The reason I am rehashing all this is because I have lived almost five decades knowing that the vast majority of people in this world, if not left breathless with giggles at the things I say, do, and believe to be important, interesting, and true, are either bored, puzzled, nonplussed, dismissive, or regard it as an assault on everything that's good and holy. Or it just makes their heads hurt. It’s always when I’ve said something that seems to me to be perfectly clear and straightforward that no one gets it. I might as well be a squid squirting ink.

I started writing in the first place because words failed me. Words could not carry the meanings, the reality of what I wished to express. Every poem succeeds if it succeeds through the failure of words that comprise it. The word that can be spoken is not the word. This is an important truth to me.

In my twenties, long before I was diagnosed as Bipolar, during periods of mania I would often wander about in what amounted to a state of religious or spiritual ecstasy. I literally had waking visions. I saw streams of color emerging from and returning into people like a stream of smoke from a cigarette exhaled and re-inhaled. I saw “angels,” numinous entities that would descend and inhabit trees or dance on telephone wires. When the moon was full I thought I could see the man in the moon talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and would try to read his lips. I saw other things I won’t talk about right now. Call them visions or hallucinations; neither term is adequate to describe the reality of the experience. To speak of these things at all diminishes the reality of the experience. Words fail. My blog is the one place I can have it my way, a place where I can make my stand. As I am a party of one, I have become an army of one, rhetorically speaking. I wage war with words on words. I commit poetry, satire, and parody, not pillage, rapine or murder. I leave the latter violences to the literal minded thugs which almost all creeds or sects no matter how high-minded contribute at least some few to the world. My words “are but warriors for the working day”

Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'dWith rainy marching in the painful field;There's not a piece of feather in our host-Good argument, I hope, we will not fly—
Shakespeare, Henry V

*Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.