boscohorowitz
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“he Seattle Times, however, found “little sign of an imminent exodus” from the park, adding that “many campers appear to have come less for the protest than for the offer of regular meals and a place to pitch a tent””
from the wiki on CHOP, the temporary autonomy zone protestors set up in Seattle.
The homeless are a critical element in all this.
If you’re from Portland/Seattle, you know that the downtowns of both were already de facto occupied by homeless people camping in tents on the sidewalk. Lots and lots of them. The very numbers point to the constabulary/city admin being poverwhelmed by the homeless problem, much of it migrants from other cities that are nastier to the disenfranchised than around these parts.
These downtown campers represent only a small part of the entire homeless population, most of it forced to camp on the no man’s land between the freeways and the streets.
While we ridicule/applaud the proclaimed reasons for these spontaneous gatherings (and they’re spontaneous whether or not they coordinate/are misinformed-inflamed via media), the underlying reason is simple: the rent’s too goddam high, the jobs are increasingly totalitarian shit-cropping “gigs”, and, well, the system’s crashing, period.
A system that is crashing under its own degenerate weight should expect to get some “help” in its destruction by those whose lives have already been destroyed by said system.
As for the cellphone study that says people voluntarily chose to exert various degrees of self-quarantine: chose is not a misleading word. The fact that our media offer misleading tripe in place of honest accurate reportage does not remove the element of choice in these people’s actions. They were not legally or otherwise coerced. They did indeed make their own choices, however misinformedly or otherwise… (beginning with a comedic run to stock up on toilet paper).
If we can’t even maintain the distinction between coercion and self-choice, we might as well give up discussing world affairs and instead, become a philosophy forum in which 15-yr old girls throw names like Kant and Wittgenstein around.
I can handle nuclear energy. It can be done properly, and our energy diet will require aid to prevent too fast a drawdown and the attendant violence, including the prospect of nuclear war, but yes, Shellberger smacks of selloutism all around. For allI know they’re making offers you can’t refuse these days.
Yo, oxy: if you email pastmastergeneral@gmail.com (hello snoopbots) and give me a mailing address, I’d love to send you some scratch. Not much cuz we’re not so flush anymore, but we’re far from hurting.
Don’t be shy. There’s a time to give and a time to receive.
“yes, but how does the dough rise?”
Lester Young invented the expression, “dough”, as I understand it.
“I get intellectualization-as-defense-mechanism-against-cognitive-dissonance.”
To borrow a very old Woody Allen punchline: “Now you’re messing with my hobby.”
” Just using less than we are used to is the adaptive path into the future.”
That’s the recipe for everything, period. The Era of Astronomically Excessive Gluttony is over. Monoculture — food crops, trees, dental floss plantations — is over. We CAN harvest wood in large amounts from forests, but not so… “efficiently” aka maximum massive rapid production/harvest. I wasn’t limiting my thoughts on firewood to gathering squawwood, although I foresee that being a major activity in not too many years.
“Texas Governor Abbot ordered bars (therefore strip-clubs, too) to close last Friday, due to rapidly increasing COVID cases.”
Strippers wearing face masks just cracks me up.
Y’all know this one. Sing along time!
While it is true that our No Forest Fires Tolerated policy of most of the mid-29th century is part of the process, so is the fact that we took down all the old growth and replaced it with a ‘just big enough to be worth harvesting’ culture, and gobs of little trees burn faster and wilder than not so many massive old trees.
It is not so easy to set an adult redwood on fire. That said, this guy said this. Bur his blog has ‘green’ in its title s of course he must be lying or at least misinformed, right?
I dyslexicated. I fix a sentence from above:
“but to keep a home warm and have some hot water for a bath 2-3 times a week and process harvest/cook food regime, wood in the right combustion chambers/heat sink/release infrastructure is far better than massive power plants…”
““Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels”.”
Depends on infrastructure and application. Using wood to run a power grid is probably mighty bad (but probably no worse than coal), but to keep a home warm and have some hot water for a bath 2-3 times a week, wood in the right combustion chambers/heat sink/release infrastructure, and process harvest/cook food regime, is far better than massive power plants, a zillion cars, and the insane production/distribution system we’ve come to rely on.
Even if we had fusion power too clean to meter, the essentials of entropy/waste would be daunting to keep reasonably balanced with 7.7 billion people living amid chronic politically psychopathic insanity in a culture based on narcissistic pandering to greed and ego.
***
Hey, Raul, ‘splain yourself, pls. I’m all for jokes at my expense… if I get the rationale. As it is, I just feel insulted. Either I’m dense or you need to hire a new joke writer.
“Also – I’m a bit peeved over intellectuals, academics and book writers generally right this second. I have planted thousands of trees over the last few years because I wasn’t on a computer arguing about the environment and climate change.”
My Hero for the Day.
Have some pretentious early progressive rock on me:
Awesome shot of you two.
What is it with us old men and our eyebrows?
No image of dust-enhanced sunset, JD.
Fried okra and black-eyed peas. Mmmmm….
*sniff*
Something smells good. I think Raul’s cooking, too.
The Tuskegee Syndrome in Russian covid viral research:
Ethical Issues (Per norm everywhere, really, and way better than making monkeys suffer for tresearch that will never benefit and only harm them.)
While I’m not holding my breath for a vaccine answer, I think it would be SO amusing if Enemy # 1 was the hero in this matter.
***
We have a race war, a gender war, a brand name political ideology lite war, an Islam vs JudeoChristianity war, a trade war with the China bloc, a surreal imaginary border conflict with Mexico, a butt-hurt Xtian right and a witch-hunting left high on borrowed sanctimony… and the ad-to-content ratio in our media is raising the price of bored attention to major inflationary levels even though they no longer pay the bills unless you run gladiator shows and outrage festivals like the All-Trump All-day policy of most major news platforms.
Are the times interesting yet?
Roto: I believe the internet is an illusion. Not to mention that Paul is dead, the moon landing was a hoax, and George Washington could not tell a lie. I read it on the internet.
I have proof.
One can’t argue against the rhythmic logic of Phil Collins<>Mark Brzezicki. And all the Big Hair clinches it.
Interestingly, my wife took this photo of me yesterday to model an apron she made for a friend.
Maybe I don’t like me as a 15-yr old girl that much after all.
This, rather than dramatic death counts, may define covid’s most significant impact as the tsunami begins slowly but inexorably spreading inland.
How HCQ factors into this is no longer a medical question so much as a political question. One wonders if it won’t be the political straw that breaks the duopoly’s back… and restore Trump’s election prospects and that smug grin that means he’s happy.
Maybe it’s metaxa. I got drunk on Metaxa in what was then Little Greece on Chicago’s NW side and realized that Greeks are tough motherfuckers. That shit will sure smack you down.
I’m kind of liking the image of myself as a 15-year old girl, actually. Makes me want to take advantage of myself.
***
Sadly, z, my sense of smell is growing stronger as the Portland area moisture gradually heals, as much as possible, the trauma done to my nasal capillaries after about 15 cauteries to stop whacko chronic nosebleeds. Every day I smell something I hadn’t smelt in a long time, and it usually is the funkier kind.
***
I’m neither for nor against Trump, per se, but am very intrigued by how his NPD is currently kicking his ass in response (or so I see it) to his disappointing reentry into the election campaign sphere. He did it to himself with covid, and I knew he would from the gitgo (respect my prophecy!!!!)…
… because he’s entirely political, a hierarchy jockey with no capacity for dealing with actual reality, and covid is real not political, whatever motivation may lie behind its ionitial release into living human tissue. But he’s running against a man who makes a ventriloquist dummy look lively and sound articulate, and I suspect he’ll find some footing ere long and will resume the ardurous climb to an approval platform his ego can live with.
I’m pretty sure he feels horribly betrayed. He should expect betrayal since his loyalty is ephemeral for the most part (he seems to stand by his children) but that’s not how an NPD thinks. So I see his bruised expressions from the past few days and kinda feel for him, you know? He is what he is.
My spidey sense quivers toward something lateral, precessional, unexpected or at least misunderstood and underestimated, either born from the predictably unsettled election results come November or heading it off beforehand as covid goes nuttier with each month.
“Because if eenough people gather around a cop killing an innocent man and send enough cam footage into the ethernet, that will stop the murder.”
JUst to clarify, I forgot to put the word “Not.” after the above in the original post.
“Republicans” is a broad brush stroke, z, if only because people usually hear “Republicans” or “Democrats” as meaning ALL Rs or Ds, but yes, Dubya and crew broke what was left of USA governmental solvency early in his career. Today’s Dems find Republicans useful scapegoats for their vile uselessness, and Republicans vice-versa.
But there wasn’t enough left of USA wealth even then to fix things short of turning the etnire nation into a fiscally totalitarian state.
Funny how right at the peak of genuine resource-based USA prosperity (1960s), when we had the means to fix our primary socioeconomic problems (including environmental issues). we decided to waste huge resouce amounts, including people, turning IndoChina into a rainy desert. While signing a dirty petrodollar deal with OPEC that required us to be an expanding military empire or go broke during the lifetime of people like Kissinger who crafted that deal.
And people wonder why a girl like Greta (remember her?) looks murderously angry as she addresses the UN. THose kids can’t p[ossibly be smart enough to know we screwed them over, right?
Only Maven the Raven King can save us now. (I’ll write that book next year.)
***
At a local savetheplenetoid superhealthyfoods grocery, a sign at the entry said, ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’. I wondered when they’ll figure out that as the list of inclusivity grows, it becomes a de facto list of exclusivity. LIke one of those Spanish names with 20 surnames.
Because if eenough people gather around a cop killing an innocent man and send enough cam footage into the ethernet, that will stop the murder.
IMagine if this guy used his full name. He’d’ve never killed his opponent:
So, how’s Raul this morning? My impression is you’re going through a rough patch.
Today’s USA white kids are raised about as educationally soft as today’s black kids, best I can tell, ebonics pandering or not.
Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass were extraordinary individuals. Most people aren’t.
Growing up in 1960s Chicago public ed system, I was the smart kid teachers adored. Most of the kids weren’t. School sucked for them, and the quality of erudition this achieved in them was laughably small. Public education has always been a race toward the lowest common denominator. WHite children and dark children are both being pandered to while also shamed while also pumped full of silly self-esteem-ishness (rhyemes with squeamishness) and taught mostly useless social indoctrination after say, 6th grade.
Originally, affirmative action was necessary to get any doors opened for blacks. Legislative attempts to level the playing field weren’t all misguided. BUt, even before MLK got shot, JOhnson took the money and will that was supposed to go into a major uplift program for black people to help them get onto higher ground and be prosperously self-sustaining, went into bombing Viet Nam and Cambodia into Round-Up manure.
Meanwhile, they started busing blacks to white schools… they didn’t bus white kids into black schools. THat speaks for itself. They could’ve put money and talent into black schools. INstead, black kids had to get up early and ride buses across town to go to schools where white walked ten mintues from home to school.
The reason I personally am disinterested in large gov programs is not because they can or can’t work (Bismark’s kulturkampf programs were pretty impressive, I uinderstand, and put Germany in top Euro-dog position for awhile). WHile I firmly believe that any large population civilization will be hopelessly riddled with injustice and inefficiency, that doesn’t mean we’ve never done good things on a large scale. I’m disinterested because we, USA, screwed the opportunity to use our considerable wealth of those peak prosperity years to properly egalitarize our society, and instead put feel-good Band-Aids where large major programs a la Depression Era New Deal programs were needed.
Despite all this, black people are in much better shape than nthey were in 1959. Lord have mercy. Way better. And that’s largely because of large government programs. I was a kid in the 60s. I watched this stuff happen on TV. It was a MAJOR adjustment, mostly for the better. JUst not nearly enough.
No big programs can fix things now, and governments in general will be steadily shrinking in this century, often painfuilly and destructively, and the idea of benefitting the commonwealth will increasingly be replaced by just staying alive and intact.
WHites and blacks are equally screwed by this in the long run, as Brando and Carson both stated, but for now, blacks still get the shit end of the stick relative to whites. It’s a bizarre love/hate dysfunctional unsustainable symbiosis, and it’s coming to an end.
“Today, we cross the street to get away from everyone having cell conversation and disturbing our cell.conversation”
YOu make me laugh often, z. It’s good.
Oh, I never sold that story. In terms of publishing, I am a decided flop. But if there’s a book market to speak of next year, that will change. (I suspect mainstream publishing will be stripped to the bone but internet publishing will expoerience a revitalization of what was briefly a hot market.
Radioactive 3,160 words
She was ready to die but not here, downtown, passersby struggling with their indifference to her mumbling half-life.
Difficult to die gracefully, surrounded by abundance that wanted her to be warm, well-fed, clean, and not crazy. If she held a beggar sign above a paper cup, they would put money into it, not all of it small change. An insanely kind man once told her to stay, he’d be back. Returning, he’d given her a thousand dollars. He was obviously very high. Probably coke and E, she’d thought.
It was in $20s, rolled tight, wrapped in rubber bands. She stashed it in her considerable cleavage, terrified. $1,000 could go a long way for a homeless person. But it was like placing a bundle of raw plutonium next to her heart. She was too crazy to safely handle so much money but not so crazy that that she didn’t know it.
It burned in her bosom, an almost erotic Xmas glow between her breasts vibrating so powerfully she felt a brief and highly inappropriate impulse to masturbate. Right there on the street. Crazy stuff.
She got up and pushed her grocery cart to a nearby Safeway. The difficulties began at once. She was as unwilling to leave her cart outside as a cowboy to put his horse up overnight in a town of horse thieves. Just because no one else would want her sad jumble of things wrapped in plastic and cardboard didn’t mean it would be there when she came out of the store. She knew; it had happened before.
But store security would have nothing to do with a smelly old broad (who was really only 41 years old) shrouded in street-soaked layers of thrift-store castoffs. Not with a cart full of survival junk. It was impossible for them to conceive of her as anything but a shoplifting risk, and it was equally impossible for her to show them even a $20 bill because years of street existence had taught her not to trust persons wearing any kind of badge.
She left, angry, humiliated, not at all surprised. But she’d tried.
She knew she couldn’t count on her homeless colleagues. Not only had she grown increasingly distant from them as the isolation of mental illness and homelessness took over, but anything involving them and money inevitably involved drugs, and those were worse than lethal to her.
Back in the day, before her institutionalization followed by a life on the streets, she’d sold sexual favors for drug money, gloriously wrecking her life doing drugs so she could hide from the worst symptoms of paraschizoid dementia that were equally ruining her life, disguising insanity in the more acceptable errata of heroin, X, greenbud.
She’d transformed, in the space of a decade, from a strangely beautiful oddball named Veronica leRoi into a faceless old bag lady. From a freckle-faced red-haired art major into a shambling ladybug wearing a carapace of protective stinkwear. Between these two persons, lively nymph and shambling adult, had been a metamorphic phase during which the sun rose and set at the wrong time, a twilight of brazen risks and larger-than-life thrills where darkness brought things to life, and where sunrise, after a night’s grueling revels, loomed like a vast movie screen that by rush hour was just another plate of coffeeshop breakfast that she struggled to eat before falling into narcotic sleep.
She experienced more and longer stays in jail. Eventually, someone did their proper job and got her a full pysch eval. This gave her three months of supervised care in the lunatarium, her name for the Medical Lake mental hospital. She’d emerged clean of street drugs but so full of anti-psych meds that she was in some fundamental way even crazier than before: the schism of knowing she was incurably nuts but medicated enough to act sane was too much paradox for a crazy person.
The price of a license to be insane, to receive state funds and medical supervision, is to take your meds. Show up for your weekly injection. Regular bloodwork to show you’re taking your daily pills. It didn’t last long. She’d clawed the walls of her soul until she found a way out like a cat in heat shreds the basement dryer hose and escapes through the vent hole.
Rather than be a sedated semi-crazy person hiding in a sanity suit, she became a fully insane person hiding in a street lady outfit. She didn’t consciously plan it that way, but street logic made it the natural thing to do.
The manifold layers of a bag lady outfit protected her from people as well as the elements. No one wants to rape an old bad-smelling pile of clothes, no cop saw her as trouble so long as she mumbled and shuffled along and didn’t yell at invisible things too much, no security guard wants that walking heap of dirty laundry shopping in their store, and no one who’s been through what she had tells anyone, especially in uniform, that she has money, especially not 50 twenty-dollar bills. What to do with the money was a difficult problem for her.
She talked to God about her problem, of course. Hard to be crazy and not talk to God, even if you were only talking to yourself. And it was as hard for God not to listen as it is not to take a stray puppy home.
But she rarely talked to herself. She talked to Skatrina, ghost of the cat she’d adopted during her early years as a street person. Skatrina had succumbed to feline leukemia a year ago. The details of her passing are terrible to tell. Ask God if you must know.
God gave her Skatrina’s ghost, which is to say that Skatrina couldn’t bear to leave Veronica like that, and so God granted her what one might call a backstage pass to the theater of Veronica’s soul.
So she was talking to Skat, as usual, while she walked away empty-handed from the grocery store.
“All dressed up and no place to go,” she said, stopping her cart and looking down at a feline patch of blank air, freeing her hands so she could use them to make her point. “You know I can’t just give it away. That man gave it to me, personally, and he wants me to do the right thing. You can’t just give away a gift.”
A crescent of stale coffee cup styrofoam on the sidewalk nodded agreement in a passing breeze.
“What would you do?”
She listened carefully. People on a passing bus saw an old shopping cart woman make faces like a crazy person.
“Well,” she said, pushing her cart again, “when you’re right you’re right. Let’s go visit the hot dog dude.”
The hot dog dude had been selling kosher beef hot dogs, Chicago-style or with Cincinnati-style chili, almost as long as she’d been homeless. He was someone everyone trusted, even street people. He’d proven so trustworthy that the Salvation Army let him set up a donation kettle at his hot dog stand. Beginning Black Friday, he wore a Santa suit until Xmas Eve.
He had it on now. Santa, apparently, has a thick Ukrainian accent.
“It warms body and soul,” he said. “Inside, outside.”
He always had a free dog for the terminal wino who needed a stiff shot of food to fortify himself for the next marathon inebriation. Plain. Bun and dog only. Merely looking at ketchup or relish could toss a wino’s cookies.
Two weeks to Xmas: who else should she trust but Santa?
“Hey, Red.”
“Yo, Veronica. How’s life treat you?”
“You know. Some days I think you’re the only person who isn’t in on it.”
Red knew crazy people well enough to know not to ask what everybody was in on except him. Let a loony start babbling her signature delusion and she wouldn’t stop. Bad for business, and if they didn’t leave when he told them to he’d have to call the cops, which was about as much fun as collecting a gambling debt from someone’s granny.
She looked around, then dug into her blouse.
“Here’s $1,000. Will you hold it for me?”
“Whoa. Ronnie, that’s lots money.”
He shook his head. Why him? Being a saint has never been easy. If he were to find out that he was a saint, he’d quit.
“Can I ask where you got from?”
“Breakaway. You could tell by the glow. The guy’d broken free of the chain game. He saw me, knew it was safe to give me the money.”
“Some guy just gave you money?”
“Yeah. Like I said, he was obviously renegade. A living spark. I hope he makes it. Not many do.”
“But he actually gave it for you.”
“Yes.”
“$1,000,” he said, counting it carefully in his pouch, out of sight.
“Just like you see here. A roll of $20s. I can’t spend it.” Her face crumpled. “I don’t… I don’t know how, Red.”
“How do I know it’s not bad money? You know: criminal?”
“He had the glow, Red. The glow. Like Xmas on the 4th of July. Look at it. See how it shines? It’s not bad. No way.”
“Well, ok, but if someone ask me about $1,000 missing cash, I give it to them.”
He looked hard.
“And if I have to, I tell them it comes from you. I have people count on me, Ronnie. I can’t afford trouble. But if it’s dirty, they probably won’t care where I got it. Unless they’re cops. Bent cops are devil’s mafia.”
He put the rubber bands back around it and tossed it in the bun warmer.
“You just want me to keep, right? Not for myself. Just keep safe for you?”
“Take $100 for yourself. For bum food. And,” she said, like a child asking for extra allowance, “can I have a chili dog?”
He shook his head, laughing.
“Ronnie, you’re something else.”
“You’re the only person I can trust, Red.”
Still shaking his head, he handed her a chili dog.
“Thank you. I’ll tell you when I figure out what to do with the money.”
“You crazy woman, Ronnie, you know?”
He winked.
“I know.”
She didn’t realize until she was almost there that she was at Skat’s grave. Lost in thought, she didn’t recognize it by sight but because Skat stayed back. Skat didn’t like this place. Ronnie understood; she didn’t like it either. But when she needed to really think, not be distracted by all the stuff that stirs the thoughts of crazy people, she would find herself here.
It was a dead place, just another highway bridge underpass in downtown Spokane, void of graffiti but for one pointless scrawl like a chalk outline at a murder scene. The only time she got the old heroin jones was here. There, two feet above her head, was the drainage pipe with the loose mounting strap, now crusted with rust, no longer a nameable object, just another mysterious object en route from being one thing to becoming a part of a million other things.
But for her, it would always be The Strap. She was sure she would be able to taste a trace of its rust in a glass of water. At the time of its use, Skat was half-unconscious, her head one huge bubble of mucus with breather holes burbling near the mouth like tiny vents in a new born mammal whose mother hadn’t yet licked away the birthing membrane. The Strap was just loose enough she could pull it back enough to place Skat’s head between the strap and the concrete wall, then wrap it around her neck like a collar, and then jam it between the drain pipe and the concrete so it would hold firm when she grabbed Skat’s shoulders, closed her eyes, and screamed bloody murder as she jumped off the tiny ledge and let her full body weight rip the head from the rest.
It had been the only way she could think of to make sure the euthanasia was a clean kill without her having to see it happen, and she wasn’t taking her to the Humane Society. They’d take over and Skat away from her, and she wasn’t leaving Skat alone even with the nicest volunteer vet.
She’d held the headless torso as it clawed spastically for a moment and then went still as she screamed with a fullness of intensity that made red spots swim in her tightly shut eyes as the noise found its harmonic point and was drowned out by its own echo, an enormous throat eruption followed by ringing silence.
She couldn’t look at it, couldn’t let go of it. Fortunately, it had rained heavily and softened the ground nearby where the city grew one of those insipid bush gardens you see along highway exit ramps.
She’d kicked and shoved her shoes off, then dug with her heels, then with her toes once it was deep enough for them to get a grip, until she felt confident she could let the body go and cover it with dirt before she saw it.
She gathered stones and pounded them into the ground with more stones to keep the rats off. She dug another hole, this time with her hands. Then, walking backwards, her feet sweeping side to side the way that ninjas, stealth-invading an enemy’s house, do so that they don’t step on the sharp objects their intended victim might place around their bed, she’d crab-swept her way toward where she’d seen the head roll. Until her feet touched something warm, wet, and dead.
She did with it exactly as she had with the body, except that she said goodbye before covering it with dirt and stones.
It was a place that braced thought, forced her to focus until an answer came.
By the time that happened, she could hear Skat meowing nearby, worried, angry, cold. She jumped into Veronica’s arms when she left the bridge’s zone of screaming silence, burrowed into her coat layers, and soon was asleep as Ronnie walked the six or seven blocks back to the hot dog man.
“I know what to do,” she said.
“So you will now take back your money?”
“Yes, please. $900. Minus tax,” she joked. She was happy with her decision.
He took the money out from the warmer, the fresh smell of yeasty bread jarring her 30 years back, family dinners, first Sunday every month. He fiddled in his apron pouch. Then he made a fake hot dog, just a bun with $900 in kosher bills, in a paper boat wrapped in aluminum foil. She placed it in an inside coat pocket.
Then he made her another Cincinnati-style.
“What you do with it? If you don’t mind I ask you.”
“Get me a cat.”
That was the easy part. Stray cats found her like crazy people found Red. The hard part was buying cat food. Finally, desperate, she’d let herself act like a crazy person, standing outside the window at Petco, unwrapping her phony hot dog and then waving a fan of $20s like a geisha looking to get lucky.
The manager came outside.
“Um, ma’am, um, um. How can I help you?”
“Yes.”
She explained the deal. He tried to talk her out of it. She stopped him short: “Mister, I’m a crazy homeless cat lady. I know what I want, and I know why.”
Viewed from her perspective, it was a brilliant idea. She even bragged a bit to Skat.
“The chain game can’t touch this. It can’t touch what it doesn’t understand.”
Which was true. No one who went through her stuff, as sometimes happened, knew what to do with 90 ten-dollar gift certificates from Petco that specifically said Not Redeemable For Cash.
She knew that she probably fed as many rats as cats, leaving little piles at certain naturally feline locations, mostly alleys. The cats that came to her, as cats always did, weren’t fondled, just fed, although whenever possible she followed the nearly invisible signs to where the cats lived, and made cardboard and shredded blanket hovels in the clever hiding places cats find.
She didn’t pet them because if she did she’d have to keep them, and a street lady pushing a cart full of cats is asking for trouble. Not to mention her horror of having another cat get sick and die on her.
Ten bucks a day fed a lot of cats. The cats grew healthier-looking but by the time the gift coupons ran out, half of them had already disappeared, taken in by the animal control authorities, by the kind-hearted with a home to offer, by the nature of existence. None of her business. The chain game wrote its own rules. But she’d managed to sneak a little over a thousand pounds of cat food through the loopholes.
Red was impressed. Happy for her. It had become an official understanding that she could have a free Cincinnati-style every day his stand was open, 5 days a week plus afternoons on Saturday. It was about all she ate these days. Her stomach didn’t like her anymore. Soon, she just ate them plain.
“You should get that looked at by doctor,” he said.
“You should get your head examined,” she replied, a human being for a minute, something only Red got to see anymore.
“What will you do now the money is gone?” he asked, warily.
After some consideration, she said, “I’ll be very sad.”
And so she was, sitting by her pushcart on a moderately cordial March day, some wind, some blue, some white, some gray, not warm but not cold, and always a patch of sunlight somewhere, nosing the sidewalk like a stray. She was ready to die, how she didn’t know, but not here. Not where they put you in a hospital like cats in the dog pound, no one coming to even consider taking you home.
She got up, painfully, and pushed her cart to an alley by a parking lot so the sun could still reach her. Settled between two garbage cans, she blended perfectly with the junk. You’d almost have to step on her to know she was there.
Several of the cats she’d fed for three months came to her that afternoon, drawn by her scent, something between used kitty litter and soup gone bad. She scatted them off like flies from a dying person. She didn’t feel so good.
Another cat came to her. It didn’t beg insistently like the others to be fed, in fact, it looked remarkably well fed for being a street cat. It just walked up and meowed, not a querulous yowl nor a complaining whine. Just, “Meow.” She let it settle into her lap. They fell asleep.
The person who found Veronica, still warm but no pulse, found a good home for the cat. We trust that Veronica did too.
<end>The days when you could smoke on television. A different world.
I looked into my inherent racism long ago. It’s a latent thing. In action and consciousness, I am ridiculously inclusive of anyone that doesn’t bite or glow green in the dark.
But numerous reflexive/instinctive biological factors, along with overt and subliminal cultural mesaging, mean that whenever tensions arise, like will sidle over to like and avoid the unlike. This naturally (d)evolves into dislike.
I often use the word nigger to remind me and others that most of us are racist under the skin (ha!). It of course gets me called racist. SOmething between shoot the messenger and pin the blame on the donkey.
But remove the tensions and erode the negative messaging of a systemically bigoted culture, and diversity would be a delight not a dread. We’d mingle gladly, intermarry, more or less dissolve the problem. But let scarcity occur, and small diifferences between people will become fighting lines of demarcation. Racism is entirely Darwinian, from genetic inheritance to exacerbation by scarcity and other survival pressures.
Tensions are anything but removed in our society/planet, and opposing camps of countless stripe are being formed even as we squeak.
I no longer pay attention to large attempts to resolve such issues. We don’t form enough cohernece outside of very local groups to create the kind of solidarity it takes to solve such problems. We can’t even agree on whether we should act in concert to cope with a virus that, in effect, works in relentless lockstep against us.
I recall that a major argument by pro-slavery forces in antebellum USA was that laws forbidding slavery violated their freedom. Hiearchic privilege conflated with freedom. States’ rights are still spoken in reverent breath by many, as if sonuvabitchery were somehow okay when practiced by smaller numbers in a smaller geoography.
It pains me, but I have abandoned involvement with, or faith in, large-scale movements or groups. The center won’t hold… unless those involved are paid well, and even that is not really bonding, forming just a temporary gooey aggregate.
I look at what’s in my immediate vicinity and do something there and then, then detach. Kind of Dao/Buddhist. To me, the moral of the Good Samaritan is that you help the fellow where and when you find him, using what you’ve got. Not that this will cure our ills, which I believe are terminal. But it will alleviate or even cure the ill immediately before you.
Thinking we have to act in concert is how we got here: public indoctrination on a mass uniform level.
What makes TAE work financially to whatever extent it does is because a) Raul does what he believes is right (for better or worse), and enough of us here like what he does to at least throw chump change his way. There’s no denying the scalar power of group action. Strength in numbers. But the vector is what makes the scalar happen, mean anything. Raul vectors; we like what he does (if only to have a group bitching club in which to commiserate our alienated souls); it motivates us (via a # of ways, some profound, some petty, with oozy overlap) to send money his way.
We are social animals evolved through a species lineage big on hierarchy. We tend to follow leaders. Raul is a leader. I ain’t exactly a follower, but if a guy leads forthrightly and independently in a direction I deem worthy… it’s easy to follow a trail after someone else has broken through the snow crust for you.
I doubt very much we can save the nation much less the planet (whatever saving the planet means), but we can save our souls, our consciences.
I see Raul working to keep his soul aligned with his skin. In the process, other souls experience some salvage, are steered out of the current taking them over the falls’ edge.
Here’s a story I wrote some years ago that looks at some aspects of this from a sideways ledge. Kind of a Moebius lens, maybe. Something about doing nwhat you can with what you’ve got despite the situation being obviously impossible. Like the guy with the really small penis who said, when his lover of the evening said, “and who do you expecty to please with *that* tiny thing?”
“Me,” he said.
Or like the ending of a Russian fairy tale Nobokov used to end one of his stories: “Which arrow flies the farthest? The one that hits its mark.”
God rest ye, Martin Luther King, let nothing you dismay. Ya dun good.
Story in next post.
Will do, Raul. I takes me a bit of motivation to watch non-musical video anymore except well-done TED talks or well-done comedy. An allergy to modern cinematic media from my years alone with only sky as my TV.
But I will eat one of these here burgers what I dun cooked for me and my wife, take a deep breath, and dive in.
“It drizzling, its mosquito heaven, they were overflowing with city expats flapping their arm at the attacking mosquitoes.”
There’s no denying the marvel of city expats wandering about a tailored and paved bit of forest, flapping their wings before they metamorphosize into cyborg off-road vehicles and take flight:
The role of Venezuelan heavy/sour oil is significant but not irreplacable, which replacement is already in progress. As for the main geopolitics driving our relations with places like Venezuela, Iran, Outer Barsoom, god knows who, seems to me there’s one basic driver: everyone hates us, no one trusts us, and increasingly aren’t scared of us. Yankees are going home, with covid as handy spur and cover.
I find myself tending to see our spat with Venezuela today as more of a Falkland Isles symbolic power show (a pathetic show but nonetheless) than anything with significant strategy behind it. Yeah, it will cost the complex oil refineries more to do replace Venezuelan oil with other sources. I see it prmarily as denialism on the part of empire. We lose face and strategic advantage with (seemingly) every military/espionage intervention we make these days, including our digital crucifixion of Assange.
Trump seems to sign of our times: a man who would cut off his nose to spite his face.
Re: Iran: The deposal of the Shah was not dependent, I feel, on covert foreign meddling. It was reaction against foreign meddling. I recall well-to-do Iranians in the states protesting on colleges in 1975-77.
If one is looking for nefarious players beside/behind the throne, this archive from the NYT back when it was still grey not black, offers some places to look:
Why Carter Admitted the Shah to the States
The Iranian coup in 1953 (not ’56) was far more internally driven than the glory boys of the old CIA like to make it seem. Oh, they were involved, but mostly they got lucky. It almost didn’t happen. Been awhile since I read that book, but the CIA is mostly the entity that runs failed stunts like Bay of Pigs or the War on Terror shit shows. The notorious color revolutions of recent times have hardly held even when we used massive military force beside them. Russia still has Crimea and the eastern third of Ukraine, Georgia is barely within our sphere despite gushing news articles claiming otherwise. We’re toast in the Middle East.
I can believe that a few clerics with a few cassettes could’ve fomented a grassfire that reached up to the forest canopy once Carter let the Shah return to the States. Various foreign entities surely attached themselves to that momentum like ticks on a dog, but I’ve come to have little confidence in the alleged powers of backstage foreign players to turn things their way except by overt brute force.
“On September 8, 1978, the shah’s security force fired on a large group of demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Two months later, thousands took to the streets of Tehran, rioting and destroying symbols of westernization, such as banks and liquor stores. Khomeini called for the shah’s immediate overthrow, and on December 11 a group of soldiers mutinied and attacked the shah’s security officers. With that, his regime collapsed and the shah fled.” (from link )
“Military traffic is not visible on those two links.”
When you nail a trenchant observation, z, you nail it.
Our culture moves too fast for us to learn accurately corresponsive lessons from itself, expanding and morphing in too many directions at once, and with little cohesion other than the money that we exchange like magic communion wafers, and the ridiculously abundant energy we spend doing anything, including breathing, even when asleep. (Around 6 months of the year in most climes, either a fan or heater or AC is running even as one snores.)
Monkeys dance around the enormous bonfire made by their resident genius, Bwonk, who’d noticed how easily certain dried grasses and seed-fluff caught fire when the early fall grass fires moved on their nearly annual journey from one side of the wind to the other, and coupled that with the sparks certain stones made when banged together. They exult in their ability to throw fuel on the fire. Some seriously fine choral hooting is heard.
The wind makes a decisive change, the bonfire becomes an inferno, the forest catches on fire.
The monkeys burn their home down.
The End***
Hi boys and girls, I’m Petri the Resurgent Virus!
***
Things evolve.
D) Stillborn Wall of Death:
***
One wonders if a stealthy ascent to the throne by Frau Hillary (that was an ethnically-based slur, y’all, channeling the WWII-derived association of Germans with Nazis) won’t trigger the seemingly inevitable palace coup by the military.
I keep seeing Pence ending up with the Ducal Signet. This doesn’t scare me quite as much as before, because the military has been having its ass handed to it abroad from every corner, and this Pivot to the East thing is such a joke. (Let’s piss into a new wind!) Even with Pence’s rampant Apocalyptarian Dominionism, and it’s significant presence in the military, especially the Air Force, I think they’re figuring out that maybe Jesus doesn’t want them to start wars they can only lose, including nuclear war. Right now, while MAD logic still prevails in terms of large-scale nuclear war, the Russians have a definite first strike advantage, hands down, while also possessing what appears to be significanly superior and actually effective anti-missile defense capability. (And, fwiw, is a more Xtian nation than the USA, and has been for longer than there’s been a USA, so any Abrahamically divine favor probably leans their way.)
If we can get through this cycle of history without going globally nuclear on each other, the hard facts of Peak Oil seem likely, imo, to foment populist desire to turn those thermonuclear swords into fissile atomic plowshares generating energy for a collapsing civilization. Lotta fissile material in them warheads.
***
Pence’s ability to manage the nation is perhaps even less than that of Trump. His is a relatively secure narcissism, since he has identified himself entirely with Our Lord and Savior (I think that’s what they call Him), Jesus Fernando Christ, and can thereby conceal from himself his obvious pointlessness and incompetence by his unquestioned righteousness and will to Do the Right Thing. That makes him more stable than Trump, whose narcissism lacks that shield of divinely endorsed sanctimony that religiously narcissistic moral supremacists like Pence possess, a shield of self-serving bullshit that gives Pence considerably more peace than poor sick old Donald gets.
So, that aspect of the collapse currently doesn’t worry me quite as much as before… but that could change fast.
His expression is identical to the smug arrogance we see in Fauci’s face.
I think this picture is priceless:
“US sanctions and Rosneft’s departure have also exacerbated fuel shortages in the South American country. In response, the Maduro government turned to Iran, which sent five fuel tankers in defiance of US threats. Tehran has vowed to continue supplying Caracas with gasoline.”
I assume Russia still has their back but prefers to not providfe an excuse for insane USA accusations, etc. I see Iran being given a chance to strut its stuff for the non-USA world.
Funny. I thought we’d withdraw most of our troops into Saudi Arabia as out final bit of empire by now. But apparently even that’s too dangerous for us now, else why bother with Venezuela’s xhitty low-grade oil?
Here’s payment:
Considering how little anyone, rich or poor, bathed in those days, the rifraf might have had the best ‘seats’ in the house. Thanx, Z. That kind of cherry-topped my day.
Willaim Gibson said the internet was the most perfect time waster ever invented, and that’s what was so great about it, but sometimes, you gotta wonder:
The music and singing are pretty good for me, but… watch the video. See how foreign those people are to us. Can you imagine the crippled guys being shown that way today? Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s like a foreign language:
My parents: I fear the elections. Not even rationally. It’s like how animals feel pre-earthquake tremors that we don’t. Logically, as you well know, there is ample reason to fear them. But MOngo just wanna pee his pants. Like that real Wiley Coyote moment we’ve been talking about.
Oh yeah, me like uber-deep fractals. NOt just pretty, not just hypnotic, but there’s something subconsciously semiotic about them. The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan in his terribly written book on media. Same with fractals. The fractality itself says something that my deeper intution understands but cannot report to the captain upstairs pretending to be in charge of me.
