The Jetta Heats Up

In addition to this blog, the Jetta, for which it is so named, has been in a state of disrepair. As the summer has climbed higher and higher into record temperatures, the temperature of my engine has also climbed above its normal, seasonal levels. This has resulted in a momentary shutdown (arh) of all jetta usage and has relegated all motor-vehicular transportation to other apparatus. I realize the rather large amounts of shame that go along with bumming rides and using your parents gas, but these are trying times. Damn trying, some might say.

With the Jetta down, but not out, I've decided to attempt to repair her myself. I've conferred with some mechanical minds and their prognostications give me both hope and confidence that the Jetta can be both restored and reinstituted. All I have to do is change the thermostat.

Before we go any further with this post, I must assure all 6 of you who still read this that "I ain't got time for" global warming or any other theories about why my car has been driven to exhaustion. I also ain't got time for workin' out in 113 degree heat either.

Anyway, while at work today, I listened to various channels on Sirius Satellite Radio.

How bout a nice, warm cup of STFU

Jorge Luis Borges in The Immortal

Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they excute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of disolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a tertinginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier; I think we did not even say goodbye.

Well... who do you wanna blame?

If lust and hate is the candy,
if blood and love tastes so sweet,
then we give 'em what they want.

So their eyes are growing hazy 'cos they wanna turn it on,
so their minds are soft and lazy.
Well... who do you wanna blame?

Hey, give 'em what they want.

And that John, the Favorite, was a Dry Fly Fisherman

"It is those we live with and love and should know that elude us."

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. But when I am alone in the half-light of the canyon, all existence fades into a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

The Report and Other

"Tragedies are like facts. You have to pretend they don't exist."
- Stephen Colbert

Also, this week I saw a bumper sticker that read:
"I support our troops and President Bush's decisions."


...things are heating up!

PS: I'm currently listening to Jeopardy by the Greg Kihn Band. Ooooh-ooh-oooooh

Jack

105.9 FM

...you were right, I was wrong.

test

disregard this post

Across in the Research

As the child of history and reason, Revolution is the offspring of linear, successive, and unrepeatable time. But as the child of myth, it moves in cyclical time, like the stars and the seasons. The nature of Revolution, then, is dual. We cannot think it except by separating its two elements and discarding the mythic as a foreign body - and we cannot live it except by uniting them. We think it as a phenomenon foreseen by reason; we live it as a mystery. The fascination of revolution lies in this enigma.

-Octavio Paz in The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

Magical Realism

...but I think it's to ask you, if you could do anything you wanted...if you could have a wish....

And you're the kind of man who could grant me that wish?

I don't know. I'm just asking.

You know, I never got to bat in the major leagues. I'd have liked to have had that chance, just once...to stare down a big-league pitcher. Stare him down, then just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn't. That's what I wish for. The chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes to look at it. To feel the tingle in your arms as you connect with the ball. To run the bases, stretch a double into a triple... ...and flop face first into third. Wrap your arms around the bag. That's my wish. Is there enough magic out there in the moonlight... ...to make this dream come true?

What would you say if I said yes?

It's Money They Have and Peace They Lack

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

-James Earl Jones playing Terence Man in Field of Dreams

Truth and Representation

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen years old-it's too much for him-so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen to Rat: "Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckn' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back."

- Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" in The Things They Carried

Advertising has taken over...

...the moral responsibility for all of society and replaced a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction.

A facade of fearlessness

Pryor did not grow up in grinding poverty, but he had a childhood that marked him for life and that he mined repeatedly for his comedy. Born Dec. 1, 1940, in Peoria, Ill., his mother, Gertrude, was a prostitute and cocktail waitress and his father, Buck, who he saw beat his mother regularly, was a pimp and bartender. His grandmother, who raised him from the age of 10, owned a brothel.

Even though Pryor was in some ways fearless onstage — there was nothing he wouldn't talk about, from impotence to his crack addiction — there was sometimes a hint of the skinny little Peoria kid lurking behind his eyes as he performed, watching fearfully for bullies.

He dropped out of school after eighth grade, got in and out of minor trouble, then joined the Army and was sent to Germany. Discharged for getting into a knife fight, he landed back in Peoria in 1960, where he started singing and telling jokes in local black nightclubs. The jokes went over better than the singing, and in 1963 Pryor moved to Greenwich Village, where he performed at fabled clubs like The Bitter End and befriended Bill Cosby and George Carlin. "He had a sort of pain that was fairly evident," Carlin recalled of those early days. Read more...

Uncited Sources |All Is Sillyness|

By him I have been made to go in the dark where there is no light. Lamentations 3:2

"One thing, be sure of why you are in this discussion. Pride only fogs the lenses. Play is the most powerful way. Like a child; see, as in the heart of a child, play isn't concerend with what's right or wrong. It just plays; it just is; remember that truth is arrived at through many ways but that the heart shapes the mind and vice versa; what this entails = you want to show, know, be, or say truth, shape the heart, watch it within you and desire to know truth and love it above all your own wants - with God's help, all things can be known. ...remember, true answers necessitate being, not speculation."