“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Henry David Thoreau
I dragged this gravely handsome phrase into many dark bars in my twenties. Although a false introspection on my part, it predictably generated a sexual eagerness in most women who equated words, they did not understand, with all the preconditions for the love they had earlier memorized while pouring through romance magazines.
The puzzle of attraction is the lifetime preoccupation of all men.
No one ever tells boys how to do it.
When I was little, comic books convinced me I could purchase these skills by mail.
Below is an advertisement I answered.
It only worked on three girls and two boys.
The company did not return my money.
We are forever guessing
if we are a song.
Nothing is soundless.
We suspect
but are never sure that our noises carry.
My whistling
may reach Neptune.
But Neptune, like God, does not echo.
Birds don’t care so much
for their songs.
They care about eggs and nests
and the size of baby new wings.
Cicadas lullaby summer evenings.
But the night doesn’t pick up
their theme
and begin to dance.
Flies whizz their little ditties
by our ears.
And we brush them away,
like eavesdropped insults.
The flowers
exhale their perfumes
into the winds to
blind the dazzled slave bees.
Nothing disturbs the evenhanded blizzard
that is being alive,
but the drama of surprising death,
and the odd collisions with love.
She sits among her snowflake suitors.
All sincere,
Each different,
Each the same
all waiting.
Until she finds
the one that echoes her song.
PUBLISHED: June 30, 2016
FILED UNDER: Unnoticed in Clever Worlds
PUBLISHED: January 1, 2019
FILED UNDER: Unnoticed in Clever Worlds
Little girls hold lots of love.
They brim with it so early
It spills out to cover everyone
But mostly dolls and daddy
They wait for boys to notice them
But boys can be such babies
Boys show off and push and shove
That says they will be coming.
Crushes are fun and kill the time
with the handsome men in movies.
Then engagement rings slip on and off
As proposals, there are so many.
She will be there waiting still
Until her little boy is ready.
It is time for another Israel in the Middle East only much bigger. Perhaps in Mexico as well. Life in these two geographic regions has been a miserable proposition for a long time. The West did not cause it. The Kings, Mullahs, and oil-rich chieftains kept their people in poverty and allowed them only God as comfort for hundreds of years. In Mexico, the poor were supported only by our tourism, our insatiable need for drugs and the Catholic Church.
Bringing these people here is moronically ill-advised.
We should use our weapons and military to carve out new Edens for the suffering instead of destroying everything to catch a few.
Perhaps this is what God would do if he really cared.
We are entering a new century of wars conducted by swarming immigration. Water always flows downhill. Immigration will replace the nuclear weapon in the coming age.
People always move to where their life is better if they can. They will not neatly stay in a place where their children are in danger. I think human beings with stop short of treating each other like locusts, destroying intruders on mass. But one does have to recall Hitler.
The problem with our Southern border is manageable. Europe’s dilemma may not be so easy.
I think Trump is correct that we need to document people who come here, that’s only common sense. The Democrats don’t support this because they see human beings as voting blocks. The Republicans see immigrants from Mexico as vermin.
To me, our solution is simple and has been historically validated. We just annex Mexico and make it a nice place to live again. Tidy.
How can a photograph be copyrighted when it’s confined to the public domain by definition? A song comes out of nothing. A painting is as much the hand on the brush as it is anything inherent. Movies manipulate atmospheres and the medium simultaneously. A camera’s image becomes art only when interpreted in the aftermath. Could it be that photographers are more critics than artists? Could it be that there are no artists at all, only reviewers?
I don’t get too tossed about this political correctness phenomenon. After all, when I was around twenty, I said “Groovy” and will still say “hey man” as a greeting, particularly to black people.
My father yelled at me when I was twelve when he overheard me on the phone with an adult speaking disrespectfully. He demanded that I say “Yes Sir or No Sir,” always. I still do this to this day, and I am older than everybody.meir
These rules can be learned.
I stumble clumsily over the speech regulations of today as though they are nuclear intrusions on my civil liberties. Hands always get a little burnt when passing torches. I know I am wrong, but I am stubborn so they can all go fuck themselves.
I have a theory about why these kids see slights that would have seemed not so grievous to my generation. Our millennials are the consummation of three generations of more and more targeted and cautious advertising. When the world does not behave the way it does in commercials, they are fearful and wary. They are suspicious of any gathering that does not accomplish fair representations of races, sexual identities or female /male neutrality. Words are paramount because they are accustomed to dialogue that has been worked and reworked by copywriters and advertising executives not to offend. One poorly placed word can result in the destruction of a Five-hour Energy drink or an Apple iPad. The stakes are huge.
I have two kids in this new generational cluster. I think they are better than me at that age. They, of course, roll their eyes when I behave deliberately in ways that will embarrass them. They forgive me for that, I know. They don’t know yet they will do exactly the same to their children. Nor should they.
When the Poet of Avon, Mr. William Shakespeare, this very morning, stumbled into brevity, he recognized that all other English playwrights, if indeed this is not already a sterile reservoir, will soon be marinating in morbid dread. As change is the arrow that wounds all except the archer, the notion of debuting himself this day as the writer of fewest words flung him into unkind merriment.
“Let the world find its verbosity elsewhere than from me,” he says to himself, in his new and truncated style. His work will now and forever be a port-wine reduction sauce of succinctness. “Genius is the tabernacle of the boiled down,” he gloats, ” I will leave the breadth of things to the amateurs.
“Verily,” he decides, a tad too loudly, for his mother now overhears, “I will no longer desire a theater, for after all is said, of what point is an audience?’ They are simply witnesses; bystanders distinguished only by their asses finding a seat.
No, henceforth, they will hunt for my posts on trees buildings and bushes.
Hearing this vow from her roost just outside his doors, his mother, the severely talkative Mary Arden Shakespeare dismays. Mary, a woman who could trace her long-windedness as linearly as an erection, back to the paramount exercise of pointless human wordiness, The Doomsday Book, feels her lifetime toil of maneuvering her son, about to splash into a puddle of abbreviated verbal sulkiness.
She slumps; legs splayed into a bunched nest of skirts, muttering miserably to herself, (wholly in Old English, to her credit), “I will not allow him an eternity of pithiness of verse.”
But Bill speeds by her, determined to conclude his life’s drudgery of taxing inventiveness before she can interfere.
“Romeo and Juliet,” was already redrafting itself in his mind as a love story that lasts only as long as the flavor in a piece sassafras chewing gum.
“Met Romeo today, parents way unimpressed, hook up, have a scheme, R. fucks everything up, big mess, the end.”
Shakespeare races to the Stratford’s Speaker’s corner to announce the new course of England’s scholarly conversation.
“Forever on,” Bill bellows to a gathering crowd of the muddy and toothless, “ My tragedies and comedies will come to you as “Twats.”
Be it known, that if it must be said, I will say it from inside the penitentiary of twenty-eight letterings or less. I will nail my twats to this tree as I fashion them; I will stamp each with a dollop of gruel for authenticity. Henceforth to be understood as my “gruel tag.”
My histories, poems, and essays will remain on my Facebook page.” Thank you.
I love everything about America.
I don’t believe that every veteran is a hero. I believe that some are.
I don’t believe black people are all good. But I know there are enough good ones to solve their problems.
I know that wearing pink at football games does not make me more aware of breast cancer. My mind rarely wanders far from breasts.
I don’t believe children, academics or pretty girls on TV should try to tell me how I can avoid insulting them.
People should understand that I want to offend them. It is the only way I have to find out if they are idiots.
That is how I pick my friends.
It is why my life is so funny.
