Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think.

- Alexander Pope

Not all FEMA-type bureaucrats lack vision.  Take a read from the Associate Director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense.

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Inspired by someone who likes *toys* It is now largely forgotten that the world was once catastrophically threatened with hysteria.  More dangerous than the post-modern threat of a nuclear cold war or perhaps the possibility even of pandemic flu, hysteria challenged humanity and drove the greatest minds to strive for innovative relief.  Does this claim sound hysterical? It isn’t.  (Well, maybe it is.  But then that would be consistent with this blog’s theme.)  Actually, in the latter half of the 19th century, there occurred a medical pandemic among women which was labeled “hysteria” with symptoms ranging broadly to include lassitude,  irritability, depression, confusion, palpitations of the heart, headaches, forgetfulness, insomnia, muscle spasms, stomach upsets, writing cramps, ticklishness, weepiness. abnormal fear, unexplained sweating, and excessive vaginal lubing (unprovoked sexual readiness)—in other words, almost anything.  It was, at that time, deemed that about 80% of women suffered from this critical “dementia.”   The medical  solution?  Hand massage of the vulva until the patient reached orgasm.  Yes, many doctors (all males) spent much of the latter part of the 19th century masturbating women who flocked to doctors’ office for the “cure.”  (Tragically enough, women who couldn’t reach orgasm so assisted due to a predisposition for clitoral orgasm—which wasn’t induced—were diagnosed as “sexually immature” by the likes of Freud and his brethren and constrained to years of unfruitful, even psychically-damaging, therapy to induce orgasms only in the vagina.  But that is another story…) You might think that this was a pie job (little jack horner, sat in a corner…stuck in his thumb, made her bum hum) for horny male doctors.  But actually, the doctors were generally extremely overworked, distressfully fatigued, and in desperate search of a faster, less draining solution to saving femininity, and thus humanity, since everyone was aware that “hysteria” would take down the pillars of civilization, if unabated.  But this was the age of the steam engine, the steamboat, and forays into canal construction.  Little wonder then that eventually a real man (Dr. George Taylor, 1869) would devise a coal-fed, steam-powered contraption called the “Manipulator”  for pelvic massages (paddle that pelvis, down that lazy river…)  Unfortunately, the dimensions and expense of this orgasm-assistant were such as to make it unpractical in all but very formal institutional settings. Yet, lo and behold, another doctor was thinking *small*  and devised the first battery-powered, portable vibrator (Mortimer Granville—1883), “good ole Mort”.  However, though a fantastic innovator, he was morally-stodgy in asserting that his invention was not for assisting female orgasms but merely for the excitation of men’s skulls.  Right, dude.  And condoms are balloons.  And handcuffs in the bedroom are in case you need to arrest a burglar breaking in at night.  (Didn’t he realize that once the women got a-humming that men’s skulls would get all the excitation they could handle??!!) Immensely popular from the onset, this invention, marketed as the Weiss vibrator, was almost as tremendous a relief to doctors worn down by vulva-throbbing as it was it was to the women “undergoing” this newest electromechanical “therapy.”  No wonder a recent study of female portraiture during the pre- and post-vibrator periods shows women’s post-smiles spreading wider by at least a quarter-inch. Fact: The vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron – very suggestive of  women’s priorities at the time.

The sun shone brilliantly for the first time in a good many days today just after I finished running 4 miles in Dreamland.  Though hovering around 60 degrees, I still feel comfortable in my summer running garb of shorts and tee-shirt even now, after the run, as I sit at a picnic table on the lower balcony of Garfield’s Monument intending to enjoy some peaceful moments by myself.

 

 

How are we to be other than we are?  I ask you that sincerely.  You were most beautifully you and I was most courageously me.  But, it seems, that wasn’t enough to spin the world any more quickly.  Hundreds and hundreds of instances of love-giving, forever-promising, never-releasing.  But the one moment that would have made firm our intensity—first meeting—never arrived.  Well beyond disappointment was the failure of that disclosure to me.  Were I prone to depression, I’d yet be being tossed by wayward currents along the bottom of the sea.

 

You see what I wrote above?  I felt it personally.  But it also wafted through me transparently.  As if, the life I’ve lived has been lived by many before, as well as to be lived by many yet to come.  I’m like a late fall dandelion blooming in Indian summer: individually 'me', yet no allelomorphic surprise on the road to eternity.

I should write all that I can say.  But you would be shocked.   Yes, you would be dismayed.

 

Who is expected to insure the light?  Who is expected to deliver all from the night?

 

I have killed before.  But worry not: I specialized mostly in assassinating popes only.  Or rather, they bet the farm on me being something that I wasn’t.   And the devil covered—and they lost.  Because I was never the mother-fucking chick-banger, hell-raiser, dope-slayer, idea-monger they, back yonder, made me out to be.  I was a total innocent—practically.  And it was they consequently, and not I, that kissed the ass of eternity.

 

Okay.  You think I rant.  You think I rave.  You think…as much as any knave.

 

But I know what kept me alive—as amazing as it was.  I crossed the misty, a-faerie-called-death forest-cast boundary of Christian and pagan belief.  And saw psychic the death of two pontiffs (at least!) as a form of hyper self-pagan immolation.  Yes, the catholic church, not philosophically, but organizationally was (is) an anachronistic, archaic umbilical-ification dangling its potentates like expendable segments of afterbirth or wriggling worms to be snapped up by a hungry, diving death bird flying stealth through the night.

 

And still I run alive amidst the dead—trembling with elation.

A post or so down, I spoke about feeling very Presidential.  That's because I've been warning about the pandemic dangers of Bird Flu (Avian Flu - what I call 'Dinosaur Flu' because birds are dinosaurs ) since 2004 (1-14-2004, 2-22-2005, 3-22-2005, 8-1-2005) while President George has just hopped on the bandwagon.  I must admit that it's rewarding to see the long-warranted concern and vision that I once shared with only a small scientific minority now promoted to the highest levels of public discussion.  Seems like the slow and highly-criticized response of the Administration to the Katrina catastrophe may have forced George to become more realistic about other possible dangers at hand.  Welcome belatedly aboard, George.  (Now if I could only get him to refer to it as Dinosaur Flu.)

I've quit drinking coffee.  For a few days now.  I'm actually more awake and aware of my world without it.  My running, too, is more energized without the caffeine coefficient.  So all is good in that regard.

And I have cut-back my beer-drinking significantly, too.  I may just quit drinking beer altogether.   After laborious analysis I have concluded that it's not doing much enough for me anyway.  And the days of summer when after a long, hot run I could sit in the Sun and enjoy a few beers while blogging from Dreamland are doomed by the change of season.  So really I've no reason not to change with the autumn season and start drinking cider.  Hot, not hard, cider flavored with cinnamon. 

Ha - strangely, that's the first time I've ever mentioned cinnamon online.  I really love the sound of that word.  And, of course, spice is very nice.  So come on, Cinnamon, let me in (be my cinnamon girl.)

And a female guide came to me as I was stranded upon a lake on scattered floating debris last night.  I had gotten myself out there by carefully adventuring from one piece of scattered debris to the next—the pieces, seemingly of a shipwreck, were fairly contiguous though not precisely continuous.  So my footing 'out' was consciously tentative and studied. 

However, after venturing a good distance out,  the danger of drowning suddenly came upon me as the lake whipped up with gale force winds and the debris I was navigating started to toss and flip.

"Don't look back, go on," is all she said.  So, trusting, I began.  And my footing 'in'—which I was envisioning not as 'back' to shore but 'on' with life—was nothing less than spontaneously instinctive, true, and non-reflecting.

I am here!  ha.  Thanks to my water guide, I have, perhaps, finally mastered the esoteric art of 'not looking back'.

I feel very Presidential.  Yes, I do.  Sitting on the steps of Pres. Garfield’s monument, drinking beer, tapping on laptop, sending blogs into outer space, I feel most majestic.  But I’ve poetry to write about things dear to my heart and troubling me.  So fuck the public service thing.

I’m never going to love again.  No, this doesn’t express my inner feelings.  This expresses my premonition about the way the world has for the last several years and continues to dispatch me.  Love is always just *this close*.  And then, with no warning and often little explanation, it goes away.  Poof.   Yes, some couples fuck.   My intended just *poofs*.  Of course, my intended may be just a construction of my imagination anyway.  Rumya (Rumi) is actually my sweetheart, of course.  And she says she's 'pissed' because she claims she has had writer’s block for the last couple of weeks and hasn’t been able to continue with my (our) ghost-written story.  I think she and I were just about to make love during the thunderstorm in Chapter 7…  O my god, I wonder if she’s about to go *poof* too?

Scribbled on a subway wall:
“Is there any intelligent life left on Earth?”
Scribbled underneath it:
“Yes, but I’m only visiting.”

The shadowy voice said: “Just punch it.”
So I punched it.
Then, feeling its influence upon my psyche, the voice urged: “Spit.”
So I spit.
Then the voice commanded: “Fuck me.”
So I punched and spit on it.

We do not dream dreams.
Dreams dream us.
But you can own them.
Dreams are only good if you own them.

The Sun is beginning to down each day noticeably—ever-thievingly—earlier here now at this point of autumn.  There’s no getting used to it—the season is shifting too quickly, most quickly just about now, and the seasonal remnants of summer are soon doomed to disappear.  Even a current quirky late spate of yet 80+ degree days now in mid-October here in the Midwest, too, will soon just be a memory.

 

But tomorrow is still a summer-holdout and promises to be a grand day for a picnic: lower to mid-80s, a fair amount of sunshine, with gentle refreshing breezes.  I’ll bring the bottles of red wine, cheeses, crackers, assorted sushi, and pasta salad.  O, and I’ll bring a light blanket, too, for us to lay upon.  And I’ll even pick the spot: somewhere under a tall pine that’s amidst obelisks upon the now grass-covered, once-glacial ridge of Dreamland serenely looking over the Lake of Erie—or—down from the ridge and onto the pasture aligning twin ponds; ponds where the water lilies tangle, the large orange carp are visible in the shallow, clear waters and the geese and duck care-freely still laze about—or—across from the upper pond and aside the lush low-lying meadows that court the stream (that feeds the ponds) and that’s down-water a quarter mile from the huge, majestic dam that was built to hold back a thousand-year flood that’s yet to come—or—in a shady, secret spot that Time has long forgot, much farther upstream and above the dam, at the waterfall where dreams, that once floated in the living imaginations of long-gone dreamers like surreal clouds, yet seem to flicker in the deep furtive rushing, swirling of the waters cascading downwards and then whitewatering a length of rapids before disappearing around a bend and out of sight.

 

It will be a magnificent day for a mid-autumn picnic.  I know it and would love to share the experience.  So…what’s up with you?

I

 

*jabs and points magically all about*
 a tentative 2-year-old toddler out

(glove on the other hand)
with his dad in the bleachers
enjoying a professional baseball game,
the last (perhaps) of the season.

*silently-lipped child-sorcerer incantations*

can’t distinguish between the assembled players on the field

and the boisterously jabbering fans in the stands—

and for why? there’s no reason.

 

II

 

it was nearly this time last year:

the sadness, heavy heart, the wanting so much to be a part
of something that had no parts.
now, in the moment, like an iron meteorite encrusted in the ground,

re-settled after a magnificently cosmic flight

and all is vaporized that is not found.

 

III

 

she was just like a suddenly blown-out candle
that had been set too near to an open window in the night

where a stiff autumn storm-gale, passing, snuffed her dim.

i struck (up) a match and offered, most innocently (ha!), to re-light her wick.

but she sensed the waft of a metaphorical come-on

and quickly cut my promethean gesture to the quick.

It’s ever-amazing to be alive.  To realize that I remain alive.  To look at my body and marvel at how it ever got this far.  To yet sit under a blazing Sun and ponder how, some day, its glorious form of existence and my soul’s own energy will be nearer to being One.  To drink a beer and reflect on how I could never ever ‘drink it all’ and understand that there will be plenty of beer remaining when I’m gone.  To imitate god-hood, be intimate with other god-hooders: blazon new expanses of the heart, leaps of the mind, ascendancies of the psyche, and combustions of core-knowing.  See destiny as a Mobius ring and glide, glide, glide.  Scream ‘fuck’ at the least expected moments—knowing that it’s not a crime.  Take a can of spray-paint to the Art Museum and add to all the works of the Masters and watch those works come alive.  (Wait.  Backspace over that. I got carried away a bit. It’s easy to do when life is so amazing.)  To wander forsaken orchards and freely pick and munch on apples and pears and peaches from off the feral trees.  To treasure-probe abandoned farm houses and forgotten debilitated mansions overgrown with entrapping vines and exotic weeds. To stare at the night sky and watch the constellations realign, never perceptibly but in the eye of Time.  And to truly know what it is to be high.  To be high and on the verge of, if not in the embrace of, Love.

 

Yes.  It is good to be alive.

"A real man's bookcase has barely the space for one book."

  - Tao Te Ching

Today was destined, in most almanacs of destiny, to be a day to tryst or enlist and insist.  A day of some self-indulging togetherness.

 

But instead, once again, I spend and end it alone under the storm of the surging Sun dreaming in Dreamland, imagining poetry, lusting for drunkenness, and sticking my white lily tongue out for no reason at all.

 

- laptop, beer, and me: 'after hours' on the balcony of Garfield's monument -

 

I know many of you have gotten accustomed to me calling this, my dreamground, Lake View Cemetery, ‘Dreamland’.  It is not, however, customarily referred to that way by others.  The only reason the cemetery is now Dreamland is because I am the dreamer who makes it so.  There were, I reckon, dreamers here before me, as there will be dreamers here after I’m gone, who both first enacted and will someday re-entrust the attribution.  But now, as far as I can reconnoiter, I’m the only one.

 

 Dreamland

 

What, if this life should prove to be a dream,--

A slumber journey to a fancied sphere:

Would the return to consciousness redeem

The loss, eternal, of the dreamland here?

 

What, if the scenes and friendships that seem real,

Were but the vision of a reverie:

Would the awakening again reveal
The picture of the dreamland mystery?

 

Or, would the thoughts reflected on review
Of the dream incidents, recalled again,

Forever pass away, as most dreams do,

And nought of dreamland’s memories remain?

What, if a choice were offered from above,

To live on earth, or dwell with the Supreme,--

Forgetting all the ties, endearments, love,

In this strange life, if it should prove a dream!

 

What, if the future life, too, were denied

Returning glimpses of the dreamland shore,--

What could the God of all above provide

In lieu of the lost dream, to dream no more?

 

  --upon the memorial of Albert Anthony Augustus, 

            born 1860's, died 1927.

Hi-ho.

There’s a party in Dreamland cemetery tonight.  But I wasn’t invited. 

 

I ran my 6 miles this late afternoon around a ring of Dreamland, headed for the gates just before locking time (5:30 pm), yet found myself, to my surprise, locked in.  The regular guards would never do that and, indeed, they didn’t.  At the gate, instead was a very rotund woman with a two-way radio who re-opened the gates for me while admonishing me that “The cemetery closes at 5:30.” 

 

“I know that,” I declared, ‘but it’s only 5:29.”  Which it was—both on my car clock and on my cellphone, which is synched to satellite time.  And, insistently,  I held up my phone to her face and showed her the ‘5:29.’

 

“Well, my watch says 5:30,” she huffed.

 

“Then your watch is wrong,” I matter-of-factly stated.  “The regular guards know me well and I always get here at this time and I seldom get locked in.  So I think your watch is wrong.”

 

“Goodnight, sir,” she said with obvious displeasure, waiting for me to pull through the gates so that she could close me out forever.

 

So I drove out of the gates, road down the street, parked, packed a few beers into my backpack, and hopped a fence back into the cemetery.  And here I am.

 

I know there’s a party about to start.  Why?   1) That unfamiliar guard positioned at the gate—there obviously to keep everybody out except the exclusively invited.   2) Huge decorated tents erected all about the grounds with well-dressed attendants milling as-if in anticipation...of?  3) Cars driving aimlessly around and preppy-type people darting all about in here—even after the gates are locked  and thus at a time when only the dead, myself, and Rumi (am I being redundant?) are regularly to be found.

 

 Looks like they have about a quarter of Dreamland sectioned off for a gala nighttime affair.  I imagine soon there will be spirited drinking, music and dancing, and lots of graveyard strolling all about.  In fact, I just ran into a couple of guys planting torn, numbered pieces of an artsy-type puzzle on different graves and I asked them, like a cop, what they were doing. 

 

“You guys on a scavenger hunt?” I guessed. 

 

“Just the reverse: we’re planting the pieces in preparation for the hunters who will collect them later,” volunteered one of the two. 

 

Sounds like fun, no?  But since Rumi and I were never invited, we’ve now taken ourselves to a section of the cemetery beyond what they cordoned off—beyond their bounds.  Of space.  Perhaps, time too.

 

*thinking*   It’s been a long time since I crashed a cemetery party.

 

—this is not the eighth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

While I was running in Dreamland cemetery on this Sunday past, an old man pulled up next to me in his car, rolled down his window, and asked me “When are you going to grow up and pay your bills?” 

 

“Never,” I yelled back laughing.

 

*** 

 

Today, I encountered a 40-something pony-tailed male bicycler in Dreamland who was stopped along a path reminiscing.  And he shared this with me: “As a child, I grew up here.  This was my  glorious playground.”  He just stopped talking at that point and maintaned a huge smile on his face—like the Cheshire Cat, as if the fun he had had in this playground still hadn’t yet run out.

 

“This is still my playground,” I responded to him.  “And I’m a still child here—like you and everyone else.”

 

*** 

 

I’ve been seeking refuge lately in Dreamland, after the gates are locked.  Well half-refuge, I suppose.  While the gates are yet open (only until 5:30 pm now—a schedule lasting until the Spring), I drive in, park, and run as much as I can—usually to about 5:20 pm.  Then I drive out before the twenty-foot-high entry/exit gates are slammed shut, park my car in an adjacent neighborhood, and hop a low back-alley fence back in.  On foot, with loaded backpack, I’ll seek out a quiet spot (well, actually, in a cemetery after-hours, I guess all the spots are pretty quiet)—okay, so I mean a killer, inspiring, and kick-ass scenic quiet spot like on the steps of President Garfield’s monument (see pic below) and do my thing.  What’s my thing?  This very blog, for one (and I’ll put it to post from here via the satellite of love quite shortly.)  And, of course, my affair with Rumi (aka ‘the ghost-written chapters’.)  Which is still developing (as she sits aside me smiling at what I’m typing.) 

 

“Is she (Rumi, aka Roomya) really real?” you may be wondering.  Well, yes.  I mean at least as real in terms of playful  and imaginative interaction as any ‘real’ woman has been in my life lately.  Jimmy Stewart had his Harvey.  I have my Rumi.  John Steinbeck wrote “Of Mice and Men.”  Steinbeck’s my all-forever-so-far beacon of earthly literary soulfulness, by the way.  And Jimmy Stewart in ‘Harvey”?  An unparalleled screen-cast gem!

 

So that’s it, my friends.  Here, from the steps of Garfield’s monument, owning the Sun while enjoying a beer, I bid you a fond adieu…at least until the looseness of doom shape-shifts the unknown universe into irrepressible motion unpredictably once again!

 

“That last sentence of yours is so amazing,” exclaimed Rumi.  “Do you often outburst in such a stream-of-consciousness tongue-of-profundity?”

 

“Never,” replied nfp.  “When I speak, I just speak street-talk.  All the time.  And street-wise, at that.   That last sentence—that’s how I write.”

 

“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” reasoned Rumi, in a quixotic reflection approximating an intimation to perfection.

 

***

 

“Well, I could be writing now.” reasoned nfp wordlessly to himself, with a growing, gnawing conviction that Rumi was somewhow correct.  Rumi’s words…“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” echoed and re-echoed in nfp’s immediate consciousness.   But if Rumi were correct, and he were merely writing, then she was just his own inner reflection and creation—and not truly the lovely creature he craved to keep him company through and beyond the storm. 

 

In his mind, nfp imagined seeing his fingers striking the keyboard furiously, as obsessed with typing as Narcissus once was with his own reflected image in a pool.  And like Narcissus’s forgotten girlfriend Echo, as nfp tendered the prospect of a new composition—perhaps a poem or even a novel, the echo and image of Rumi started to fade, to fade, away…

 

“But double-fuck that,” concluded nfp suddenly, silently, and with great urgency. 

 

He realized that Rumi seemed to be having a strange effect, indeed, upon him.  Her logic, though not pragmatically compelling, was thoroughly suggestive and had led him into this bizarrely lucid, trance-like consideration.  He had known seductive women before, but none whose mere words upon hearing induced him to dream at impulse with such an abandon of right reason.  Of course, she was real, he firmly concluded.  No, no, he was not writing, he was dreaming.  Or dreaming and losing it.  But losing what?  

 

Well, not losing her, at least. 

 

Finally shaking off this misflight of his imagination and regaining his sense of wider world awareness, he noticed that Rumi was again watching him, much in the manner of how they first met.  And he observed that she was smiling at him with a strangely compelling smile, while her eyes were aglow with a friendly, yet piercing fierceness.   

 

“Rapture—I’m captured,” conceded nfp in mock surrender to Rumi’s disarming attention to him.  Here under the south-facing overhang of the mausoleum, nfp now drew a little closer to Rumi, to within the cuddle of a breath, both out of attraction to her and to avoid the victimizing wet of the storm still beating down upon them from the north.

 

“Dreaming alone again were you?” admonished Rumi.  “Or writing an unfinished story?”

 

“How else to dream but cast alone to drift?” rebounded nfp.

 

“Yes, but in the land of Dreams, surely there can be more than one dreamer adrift,” soothed Rumi.  “And if two empty dream boats that have been sailing listlessly for a million years should happen to bump and lock and drift together—going nowhere, but together—what need be there to ever drift and dream alone again?  Unless, of course, one of the boats, imagines itself un-empty and bent upon purpose, and decides to cast off from the other so as to continue its lonely sojourn…”  

 

nfp was really enjoying Rumi’s reasoning: very zen and employing a sense of multivalency unknown to most classical Western-type thinkers.  He decided to play along with the imagery she had invoked, but challenge the premise: “Yet if we are empty boats adrift, dreaming, when we chance meet, what have we to give each other?  Would it not be better for us all to load the store of our dream boats with gifts and riches that we might barter and trade, and thus lavish another with the fullness of ourselves?”

 

“In life, given the confines of consciousness we consensually label ‘reality’, perhaps that’s adequate,” responded Rumi.  “Perhaps I need a conscious dose of your romantic sweet-nothings and perhaps you need a bit of my wake-me-up-to-reality angst.  Fine.  So we trade and then reassess our personal fortunes in the light of that relationship.   But in dreaming, the boat imagining itself un-empty is forever a cast-off, a castaway,” continued Rumi, “until it realizes it, too, is dreaming-empty like all else.  And has been so since the beginning of time.  For only then does the dream cease seeking.  And allow what must be, to be”

 

“Then, from what store do we draw to fill one another with friendship and love, when we chance dream encounter, if we are both truly dreaming empty to begin with?”  challenged a faltering twang of Aristotelian logic out of nfp’s mouth.

 

“There is no store in dreaming. No store at all.  That’s the point,” insisted Rumi, firmly yet gently.  “It simply invents the moment out of nothing.  What is dream love if not being entirely open, empty, and creative with each other?  And what is a dream encounter with another if not spontaneously finding the image of the God you worship therein?  And if you find the image of the God you mutually worship is Emptiness itself?   Zazen.”

 

“I could do zazen,” thought nfp, “there’s nothing better than zazen in a storm.”  And he was about to make a comment to Rumi on the nature of that discipline when a bolt of lightening struck the Dreamland mausoleum directly atop of them and all around.  They jumped, in instinctive reaction, into each other’s arms. And, though, at first breathlessly surprised with this storm-arranged intimacy, they both began to laugh.  In fact, they fucking howled for several minutes like maniacs.  And then, growing suddenly quiet with each other, they tenderly began to explore the emptiness that constituted this dream—two boats coupled, going nowhere, together.

 

—this is the seventh chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

When Xanga first went vastly public back near the end of 2000, there were no public xang-gods to guide us; there were no obvious administrators to clamor to; there was no one at all in charge with either a face or a name.

Abhoring an organizational void, I went to work with resources no longer available (a search that listed all blog activity by date) and searched back years into the formative non-public xanga past (1998-2000).  I found a lot of obviously phony blogs created by some person or persons to "populate" xanga, I surmise, in order to make xanga seem like a more considerably burgeoning online community than it was at the time.  Many of these blogs (janedoe1, janedoe2, etc.)  had passwords the same as their names. Bad, bad thing to do. Logging into them, I found various private "test" messages confirming, indeed, that were dummy blogs being used for development, testing, and fronting xanga with bogus personages.  They were all mercilessly assimilated by me.  (Bad, bad thing to do!) 

But there were other pre-public-day blogs that didn't seem phony.  People were leaving each other comments!  As it turned out, I made a list of these figuring that, if they predated me considerably, they might well be the "hidden admins" or, by a term I was later to coin for them, "the xangods" of xanga. 

Who were these individuals?  First revealed Dec. 30th 2000 to the xanga public here, they were John, Dan, Janet, Genius, Brendan.  Also, though I had yet to discover them, there were  Bob, Monsur, and Marc.  Genius (Biz Stone) is now gone from Xanga.  He eventually left Xanga to go to Blogger and has now left Blogger to go to Odeo (yes, check it out, it's different.)  I don't know how tight Brendan was with Xanga, but it appears he's no longer around either.

But as Xanga has grown over the years, so has its staff.  As best as I can tell, here are some 'new' faces on the Xanga team:  Chrischoi, Mary, Joel, Amy, Eileen, Jon, and possibly Dave--although I think he's just a collaborator to the staff and not an employee.

Rock on.

- end of public service blog -

From the north to the west, jack-hazard flashes of lightning suddenly illuminated the sky.  The countdown to thunder suggested that the thunder cell was just a few miles away.  Pretty damn close for not having announced itself without an earlier warning.  A minute or two passed as both nfp and Rumi discussed the turn in weather prospects.  Then another, brighter flash slashed across the northern post-dusk vista.  The storm seemed to be whipping up somewhere off of Lake Erie.  And, by re-count, growing closer.

 

“I think we’d better seek some cover,” suggested Rumi. 

 

nfp concurred.  Although he didn’t mind running in the cemetery rain, rain could prove very harmful to his laptop and the other cybertoys  which included a second “server” laptop, webcam, digital camera, and portable webrouter that he was currently hauling around in his ever-loyal companion backpack. .  Besides, he figured,  a soggy Rumi may  prove less engaging and fun to be around.  So he started to pack up his previously-deployed gear (laptop and an unopened beer) while Rumi signaled to her dog Denton to heel and prepare to move.

 

“Wither us?” deferred Rumi.  nfp was figuring that there were a few covered mausoleums close by that could provide shelter.  The key was to quickly assess the precise direction of the storm and then choose the mausoleum that provided the best leeward protection against the growing likelihood of a dampening onslaught.  Yet soon enough, from the north-northwest, came a sudden gust heralding the storm at hand.  To nfp, that meant that the fairly nearby Dreamland Mausoleum with its south-facing overhang would provide the optimum available protection.

 

Nick of time.  Now there’s a hackneyed expression for you.  Although “there’s a hackneyed expression for you” is probably hackneyed itself.  In any case, both Rumi and nfp had good knees and above average stamina and neither got nicked or hacked by the assortment of landscaped shrubbery they glided though as they took a direct path south to the tomb extolled as 'Dreamland'.  As they arrived at the shelter and scurried under the cover of its south overhang, nfp reflected upon how much he used the environs and amenities of the cemetery for the furtherance of his vital life interests, while others viewed the grounds only as a repository for the dead.  Over the past several years, he had run over 2,500 miles around various cemetery loops, taken thousands of photos—many of which he put to his blog, and written hundreds of blogs—perhaps half of them poems—that he had published in cemetario  using his laptop and a satellite hook-up.  He had made some acquaintances along the way, also.  He knew all the guards, as they knew him by name.  Had encountered other artists—painters and photographers mostly—drawn to the amazing arboretum-quality of the rolling landscape and the majestic monuments erected as tributes therein.  And had met hundreds of other surprised people who had just happened to wander to the perch atop the hill by the Wade obelisk where he traditionally sat blogging like a madman while consuming copious amounts of backpacked beer. 

 

“There’s a different energy here,” observed Rumi, contrasting their newly assumed position under the auspice of the Dreamland Mausoleum with the lean-against-an-old-tombstone perch-upon-a-hill carefreeness from which they had just fled.

 

Even as the storm viciously assaulted the north face of the mausoleum with drubbing winds and horizontally-driven rain, nfp understood that Rumi was not referring to the weather.  “Yes, different,” he agreed.  “I have found that there’s always a certain morbid ominousness to such considerable, and obviously lavish, structures, as this, constructed to house the dead.  Except perhaps for the Great Pyramids and the Taj Majal.  Yet I’ve never personally visited them, so perhaps they would not be exceptions, if I visited them, after all.”  And he continued, “I do so much prefer the Sun and a good breeze in dalliance under open air; the view from the un-sheltered hillside while watching the sunset over lake Erie on a solemn summer eve; the ever-remixing buzz of  the sexually-driven, the soulfully-driven, and even the hodgepodge assortment of the inexplicably-driven creatures-all just venturing forth in a spirit of laissez-faire—whether they be humans meandering, dragonflies propelling, birds soaring, or alien spacecraft flying overhead—than I do a deeply shaded-shelter, seemingly damp even during drought times, such as this where we now find us meteorologically-challenged but otherwise unbefuddled.”

 

“That last sentence of yours is so amazing,” exclaimed Rumi.  “Do you often outburst in such a stream-of-consciousness tongue-of-profundity?”

 

“Never,” replied nfp.  “When I speak, I just speak street-talk.  All the time.  And street-wise, at that.   That last sentence—that’s how I write.”

 

“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” reasoned Rumi, in a quixotic reflection, and with a smile, approximating an intimation to perfection.

 

—this is the sixth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

“Rumi,” beckoned nfp.

”Yes, Steve,” responded Rumi, receptive and awaiting.

 

“What are we doing here?”

 

“Enjoying the evening, like everyone else.  No more.  Or perhaps we’re fulfilling a prophecy.  No less.  Or just maybe we’re getting finally to know each other.  Which might just encompass the other two possibilities.”

 

nfp typed a word on the laptop sitting upon his lap.  One word: ‘fuck’.

 

Rumi looked and laughed.  “So you finally feel inspired?” she teased.

 

nfp tried to think of something clever to say in response.  In his mind, lickety-second-split, he tried out: “Novel of a million readers begins with one word.” And: “Fuck is something to say to those you love.  Or intend to love soon.”  And: “’fuck’ is a variable—easily substituted for later by global Search and Replace.”   Instead, out of nowhere, he blurted out: “’fuck’. it’s a happy sound. ‘fuck’ is the happiest sound I’ve found.”

 

Upon hearing that, Rumi bent over in convulsions laughing.  “You really know how to hurt someone’s belly, don’t you?”

 

“That’s not the question,” replied nfp.  “The question is: "Where is your home, beautiful moon?"

 

To that, Rumi instantly replied: "In the wreck of your drunken heart.   I am the sun shining into your ruin.  Long may you call this wild wasteland your home."

 

And with that response, Rumi had settled all doubt in nfp’s mind.  nfp’s redirect of the question was a reference to an obscure stanza from from the master poet Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabriii .  And she had responded in the spirit, if not with the exact words of the master.

 

“She’s the real-deal—a devastatingly attractive female of vast intellect,” reflected nfp in instinctive silence. But now he wondered:  How much of the love poetry of Rumi had this Roomya actually read?  And did she, herself, write or blog at all?  And what would she think of his own love poetry, much of it inspired by Rumi, written over the past several years in virtually this very same spot where they were now sitting together—that is, if he dared to share it with her?

 

—this is the fifth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

A view this morning of sunrise from the my backyard.  It's obviously not Fall yet. 

Who is naming these hurricanes?  Ophelia?  Beautiful name.  Tragic end.  Let's hope the namesake in this case is inappropriate.

On the grave of the world's "first billionaire", coins are still left by hopefuls as charms to invoke good fortune.

If I may interject for a moment…

 

Blogging is one form of self-expression.  A novel is another form of expression.

 

There are three reasons I see that publishing sections of a novel  on a blog never seems to quite work right..

 

1)      The sequence is whacked. Subsequent chapters of the novel are always at the blog’s ‘beginning’.  And the beginning of the novel gets lost in the blog archives.  There are, of course, adjustments that can be contrived to guide the reader back to the start.  But such go against the in-the-moment momentum that underlies all blogging.

2)      The novel form is seldom interactive; it seldom reaches out to actively involve the reader.  On the other hand, the spirit of open blogging is precisely interactivity.  Bringing the two together creates an aura of schizophrenia for the reader.  Ever known a dog that kind-of wants to bark but doesn’t really let it all out?  You know, starts the bark and then swallows it?  Such is typical of middle-age dogs suffering a prolonged adolescence wherein their mindset is “I want to bark.  I don’t want to bark.  I want to bark.  I don’t want  to bark. Etc….”  Similarly, I believe that readers of chapters of novels that have been pigeonholed onto a blog react:  "I want to interact.  I don’t want to interact.  Etc…"

3)      The novel is parasitical by nature.  To the degree that it is successful in capturing attention, it creates an expectation.  And to the degree that it creates an expectation, it requires that the blog become devoted to it.  Before you know, your swimming pool is filled with hungry piranha, toadstools are growing in your lawn, and the sheer weight of barnacles is causing your skiff to ride lower in the water.

 

 

Remarks upon an entirely different matter altogether…

 

On the way to work this morning, I came up with what I believe is a novel idea for the rebuilding of New Orleans.  I may be wrong.  Perhaps the idea is already being considered, discussed.  But if not, I believe it deserves consideration.  And it is this:

 

The problem with flooding in New Orleans is that it lies below sea level and the sea (river, lake, gulf) is all around.  An additional problem now is removing all the wreckage in order to start building anew.  One starts out thinking that perhaps the whole city should just be filled in to bring it above sea level.  But that is way beyond practical—it would make more sense to just abandon the site and start somewhere else.

 

But why not process the wreckage into such a form that we could deposit it at the center of, say, every 3 square mile tract of land in New Orleans in order to build islands that rise above sea level and upon which hurricane-resistant emergency shelters and/or other public works can be built and serve as emergency refuge?  So all of New Orleans would be dotted with predictable hills rising above the majority of land still lying below.  Of course, additional landfill would need to be brought in to add to the processed wreckage in order to make the hill high enough to rise above flood waters.  And, of course, the government would also need to reclaim such land from other use for this purpose and that might cause some additional dislocation/relocation problems.   Yet the end result would be that every neighborhood would have its hill.   “Going to the hill” (from which you could still see your house below) would become a viable option for those who would be, for one reason or another, unable or unwilling to evacuate the city in a time of hurricane/flood crisis.

  

How much will it cost?  How much fill will have to be hauled in to augment the processed wreckage?  How to decide  what land to reclaim for this use?  I’ll leave such mundane matters to my detractors who, no doubt (knowing doubt!), will begin to throw dirt atop this proposal.

Many little afterwaves of lust assaulted nfp like the batter of aftershocks that often follow an initial earthquake shaking. 

 

Here seated next to him was this dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender-built Rumi, in his eyes a most desirable dog-walking diva.  And he hadn’t even introduced himself yet.  *afterwave of lust and anonymous power* 

 

She was practically nuzzled up next to him like an intimate sharing an outlook.  And she was gazing down upon his laptop on his lap, and in his mind, somehow gazing through it. *afterwave of lust and fantasy desire* 

 

With every next moment, the afterdusk of sunset was growing dimmer and dimmer.  Darkness is becoming us.," mantra-ed nfp's libido.  *afterwave of lust and darkly surrender* 

 

And a sense of mortal time, a timeline for this or that, was, like with the onset of an awesome herb-infused high, receeding at near light-speed acceleration. *afterwave of lust an arrival of almost forever*

 

“Hey you.”

 

“Yes?” responded Rumi.

 

“My name is Steve.  But I’m best known as notforprophet.”

 

“Hi, Steve,” chanted Rumi in that utterly even-keeled, deep-voiced, drawn-out provocative kind of way that sexy women seem to have to make guys down deep inside go ‘mmm mmm mmm.’   “If you don’t mind that I ask, ‘notforprophet’ is quite a peculiar name.  You’re best known as ‘notforprophet’ for what ?”

 

“Blogging about the internet,"  answered nfp, his words not really synching with his lascivious thoughts.  "I’ve effectively cyber-infested the entire blogging internet with my notforprophet alias.  But the underlying truth is, I often just come here to blog-write and then I post my blogs from right here via laptop and satellite connection to my weblog.  I write, release, let go.  And then return another day to start all over again.”

 

nfp wondered if Rumi would ask him what blogging was.  Though not as common as years before, it was still not uncommon to start up a conversation about it only to learn that the other party had never heard of a blog before.

 

“So that is what you were doing when I first encountered you earlier?”  queried Rumi, seemingly relaxed with some idea of what nfp was talking about.

 

“Not quite.  Tonight, I suppose, I was wishing upon a star.  I was hoping for something more than just an average quickie blog to feed the world.  I was wishing truly to pierce the mystery of Life itself and reveal it to all, blogstruck, as the story of one day short of Forever.  And towards that end, I was prepping myself for an inspirational visit from my ever-elusive, sometimes-succubus, Muse.”

 

“Oh, you lost me there,” remarked Rumi.  “Did you mean ‘ever-illusive’?    Why would a creature desiring sex, if even only sometimes, if really genuinely goodly with inspiration, find reason to not be direct with you?”

 

“You got me.”  sloganned-off nfp in unknowing admission.

 

“Yes, I do.” whispered back Rumi, with a cryptic sort of knowingness.  And then she leaned-back and gazed at the first-appearing stars in the constellations of the post-dusk sky.  And sighed what seemed like to be a sigh for all the Ages.

 

—this is the fourth chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

“Hey, you.”  The voice floated like a boat on a lazy river.  An empty boat that, if it bumped into you, you couldn’t get angry at because no one was aboard to blame.  And besides, you were floating along the same river, too, and were feeling too laid back to get perturbed about anything.

 

“Hey.”  This time, the voice hung in the air like a heavy evocative evening mist, where the mist is everything: the unmoving medium, the opaque mood, and the surreptitious cover for anything to be undertaken, just steps beyond, unseen.

 

 “Hey.”  Yet a different intonation.  This voice rang clear like something sparkling, fresh like a new awakening, and it was petitioning nfp to surface from his long descent into meditative obscurity.  

 

nfp, still semi-stuporous, reflected upwards that there was something different about this persistent “hey” voice.  Something more compelling than all the legion of other voices that had jammed roughshod into his head, all jabbering articulations, all competing as enunciations, all sliding along as indistinct phonations, as he sat awaiting ghost-writerly inspiration.

 

Finally lightening up and coming back to some semblance of consciousness, nfp opened his eyes.  Before him, looking directly at him, stood the girl with the dog that had passed him by earlier.  She was standing a little bit down the hill from him, so that, even though he was seated and leaning against the old Wade obelisk, their eyes were about at the same level.  Her head was angled inquisitively askew as if to say “Are you there?” Her jaw was slightly lowered as if a word were about to drop.  Her left arm was upon her hip and the other was holding the dog’s leather leash folded like a strap. “Dark eyes, dark long hair, and a strap.”  That was nfp’s silent triangulation.  He always immediately triangulated everyone new he’d meet as he first met them.  And he had never before triangulated anyone else thusly.

 

“I’m sorry. I was floating in a pool of nether inspiration and didn’t realize that you had returned here,”  nfp finally responded.  The girl had said “hey” (or so he thought) three times and so it was incumbent upon him, he reasoned after all, to reply.

 

“I’m not returning,” the girl corrected nfp.  “I’ve been about this hillside for the last hour.  You just kind of went into a trance when I was first passing by and I was a bit worried about you.  So I lingered.”  She gave the leash-strap she was holding a quick, sharp snap and her dog, which once again had begun to wander away, returned to her side. 

 

nfp’s eyes wandered back to the strap.  There was something about that strap, something that made it special.  The girl noticed nfp’s redirected attention and didn’t hesitate to explain.  “Oh, that whip-snapping?  Well, my dog Denton is deaf and only responds to visual cues.  But I’ve got him trained to watch me so it isn’t a problem.”

 

“But,” nfp recalled, “before—when you first passed by—didn’t you call out to your dog, I mean Denton, ‘Come on.  Let’s go.’?”

 

“Why do you assume I was speaking to him?”

 

“Well, who else…” but nfp’s thought process was disrupted inexplicably.  And he felt a first wave of lust as he stared wordlessly at the denizen of dusk before him.

 

“My name is Roomya.  You can call me Rumi,”  she answered his stare.  “I’ve seen you here before, just before dusk.  But it always has seemed like just when I’m arriving, you’re leaving.  I figure that that’s probably because you want to get out of the cemetery before they lock the gates, at dusk, for the night.  On the other hand, I find my freedom here, to wander with Denton, after the gates are locked and all the drive-thru voyeurs have gone home to watch TV.”

 

At, after dusk?…nfp’s thought processes started churning again.  ”What time is it, Rumi?”

 

That was a purely rhetorical question for nfp to ask.  And as he asked it, he knew it.  And he didn’t even know why he was asking her  it, anyway. Except that maybe he felt compelled to acknowledge her by her name, “Rumi.” namesake also, he recognized, of the 13^th century Sufi master poet.  Anyway, he now realized that while he was ‘trancing’ that it had gotten late.  Much later than he would have hoped.

 

“Oh, the gates are locked already,” replied Rumi.  “Look there, to the west, over the lake.  The last glimmer of sunset is well below the horizon.”

 

And at that moment, as nfp looked at the last crimson kiss of the Sun dropping below the wake of the lake, Rumi took two quick strides up the hill, dropped the leash-strap, and slithered comfortably right aside nfp, sitting with her back also against the old Wade obelisk.

 

nfp felt a second wave of lust as he sensed Rumi’s proximate gaze upon him.  He realized it would be so easy, now, to just take this Roomya creature into his arms.  Just to take her into his arms.  No more conversation.  No questions answered-asked.  And then he suddenly amused himself by remembering  some lines from a Gregory Corso poem called ‘Marriage’ …

Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--

 

 

“Whatcha writing there on your laptop?”,  Rumi asked playfully, fixing her attention upon nfp’s lap-ridden business.  “Looks pretty blank to me.”

 

—this is the third chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

After drifting off to dream of other things and better, notforprophet never did reawaken.

 

It’s somewhat sad, but it appears that the Dreamland he so loved claimed him for its very own right on his verge of novel discovery.

 

The police, however, are treating the discovery of his cadaver atop a hillside in LakeView Cemetery as an open case.  Though they do not yet suspect foul play, it seems that he was found the next morning after his death—estimated by signs of rigor mortis to have occurred somewhere around dusk, Sep. 4^th, the night before—with a laptop aside of him that was still running.  Police have confirmed with computer experts that the particular make and model of the laptop that was found aside him could not possibly have sustained its active session throughout the night without the battery going dead.  So this alone, notwithstanding the pending autopsy, has raised suspicions.  Police, at the time of discovery, mentioned to a reporter nearby something else that was curious:  the session of Word that was open on the laptop had a manuscript typed or pasted into it that was 200 pages long.  And it was unsaved.  For evidentiary purposes, one of the responding investigative officers, using latex gloves, saved the manuscript for fear that the battery would, indeed, eventually wear down. 

 

As it turns out, this cop who saved the manuscript was himself a blogger who just happened to have read notfprophet’s Xanga blog from time to time.  The cop recognized that the locale, the modus operandi, and even the appearance of the poor dead guy matched up pretty damn well with notforprophet’s own previous self-descriptions and self-portraits posted on the blog.   So he conjectured, quite rightfully, that a Xanga Meet-Up had just been established.   Small world, eh?  

 

After the cop saved the manuscript  with the title of “posthumous.doc”, he glanced at the first few lines.  Something about a dog and a ghost writer.  But, wait…apparently there was a girl who saw him sometime before he died.  Was she the female presence that’s also mentioned, he wondered?  The cop recognized the ambiguity inherent in the prose he was reading as ‘classic notforprophet’.    So he began to think that maybe this dead guy, that others had once affectionately called ‘nfp’, did really commence writing this protracted stream of consciousness.  But did he write all of it before he died?  The cop, not resisting his curiosity, scroll-barred to the end of the saved manuscript and read the last couple of paragraphs…

 

.  “O God, no.  NO.”   —he gasped.

 

Then he did something strange.  He rummaged through the bulky backpack found aside the corpse, found a floppy, took it out, and inserted it into the still ticking laptop.  And he proceeded to copy a certain file.  Then he removed the floppy from the never-say-die laptop, looked about to assure no one was watching, and surreptitiously slipped it into his shirt pocket.

 

—this is the second chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

Sitting here in Dreamland after running another 7 miles, I’m stunned with my own inner silence.  Laptop’s humming, sun is beating down intensely, I’m seated with closed eyes, yet nothing.  I wait.  And wait.  And wait…

 

I feel a presence near me.  It’s a huge German Shepherd that a girl is walking leashless through the cemetery.  She’s at an unapproachable distance, but the dog has strayed toward me to check me out.  I was caught off guard by its approach.  It seems that I was dreaming and just woke up.  She yells “Come on.  Let’s go.”  I guess she understands that I understand that she means the dog.  But do I?

 

My dream state was not vacuous.  There was a female presence with me.  She was typing on my laptop.  She stopped when I returned to consciousness.  I was hoping that she had written a book and left it for me in my session of Word.  Yet the page is still blank.

 

That’s how books get written, isn’t it?  Nobody really writes those things, right?  Spirits visit and endow us with the transcripts and then strangely and mysteriously disappear.  I kind of feel that the female sprite in my dream was just getting started and that that ruin-a-good-thing dog disrupted our relationship. Damn it.  I want my ghost writer back!

 

*closes eyes…drifts off again*

 

—this is the first chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

Understanding Killer Katrina...

 

Although the winds of Katrina decreased and it was ‘downgraded’ to a Category 4 (145 mph) storm before landfall, the storm surge that had formed when it was a Category 5 (170 mph) storm persisted and whelmed over New Orleans.  Why?  Because nearly all the momentum built up in the water endured—energy in water does not dissipate as rapidly as energy in wind.  So for purposes of destruction, it remained a 5 as it surged into Lake Pontchartrain.

 

Before the storm hit, I told my buddy Mike (in Arizona) that I expected 5,000 dead as a result of this storm.  We both expected New Orleans  to become a lake.  It’s funny how to regular guys like us had it all figured out, yet Mikey Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, even now is adamantly maintaining that the Katrina scenario that Mike and I (and nearly all the rest of you informed victims and observers) were envisioning didn’t exist and was beyond imagination.

 

What a total crock of bureaucratic shit.  If Bush doesn’t fire this lame ass, then we must conclude that Bush stands behind this totally unacceptable self-serving alibi-ist.

 

"There's a lot of aid surging toward those who've been affected. Millions of gallons of water. Millions of tons of food. We're making progress about pulling people out of the Superdome," the president said.

Millions of tons of food?  2,000,000,000 (two billion) pounds of food?!    Bush had better super-size New Orleans' plumbing while he's at it.  And to have "millions of gallons of water...surging toward those who've been affected"?  Well, just a poor choice of words, in addition to the forementioned presidential hyperbole.

 

Given the ill-prepared response by government to this disaster,  I just wonder what our government would (will?) do if…

 

the Canary Island mega-tsunami unleashes? 

 

an Avian-flu pandemic strikes? 

 

or the Yellowstone Park super-volcano, long overdue, re-erupts?

I’ve a goal to run 21 miles this holiday weekend.  It’s a modest goal.  One of many.

 

I’d also like to get a lot of reading and writing done. 

 

Normally, Dreamland is quiet enough for reflecting, composing, writing.  Today, however, there are a couple of young blonde caregivers tending a group of about ten brats (Okay, some of them are cute.  I mean, besides the one blonde caregiver.)    They’re here, I gather, to observe the National Air Show in Cleveland this weekend from upon the hillside where I normally lounge after running, blog, get smacked around by my muses, etc.  The brats are essentially acting like hippies and running all around the hillside, dripping popsicles on headstones, and screaming at the top of their lungs.  It’s charming.  I think.

 

uh-oh.  They must have heard me writing because they just left.  Either that or the sight of a madman who runs around the cemetery for seven miles, then drinks beer as he pounds on a laptop is too much for that one hot blonde to handle while she tries to martial law the brats.  And I was just starting to adjust to them.  In fact, my muse, was prepared to make a sport of the whole event.

 

Of course, I am the interloper.  Not them.  They’re innocents plush with life who come here as cute and wee tourists.  I’m  a hulk infused with the battle-spirit and have arrived here to challenge the foundations of all that’s dear to the obstructers of one day short of Forever.  Shatter all mindsets.  Pummel all preset precepts.  Strike a blow against Death  itself.

 

Still, I feel.  I feel for them.  I feel for you.   I truly feel for all of Life. 

 

The only difference being that I chose ‘this’.  And not ‘that’.

 

I don't have the right, the permission to republish this article below.  Fuck it.  Politicians from the President of the United States on down to the mayor of New Orleans don't have the right to claim that this totally pre-envisioned Katrina disaster was 'unimaginable' and 'beyond all possibility to plan for or respond to.' 

We now need to help the people.  But in the months to come, let us not forget the leadership we lacked for days and days and days, allowing even the most backward third world countries today to feel that their absolutely corrupt and inept ingrained leaderships are more beneficient and enlightened than our very democratic bushistic own.

From the National Geographic,  ***October 2004***
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr. (prophet extraordinaire)

The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
 
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
 
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
 
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
 
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
 
"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are,"
Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."
 
The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
 
Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes.
 
A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.
 
While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison.
 
Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.
 
To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever.
 
Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach.
 
Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning air-conditioner. "They should take the levees out and let the water run; that's what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution."
 
Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a 26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon.
 
"Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite lush," says Reed.
 
To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then live with what you get."
 
Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts.
 
Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and salt-tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters) a year—have had limited success. Despite the challenges, the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels.
 
Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel.
 
"Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year-old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows.
 
Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water.
 
But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy to be in this business."
 
Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300 million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be happy," he says. And so he does.
 
After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover the sun."
 
To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation.
 
The state's first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.
 
The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana's vanishing marsh.
 
You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a bargain.
 
"We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas,"
Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the infrastructure to handle it."
 
The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob
Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land above them to slump.
 
"When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss in the state.
 
The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what.
 
A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain.
 
"When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to pay."
 
I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy, lazy feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not.

I’m not really in your house.

Not really.

My words may be on your monitor. 

Perhaps I’ve made it that far.

But, even then, you may not be home.

You could be blogging from a cemetery like I often do (am doing).

Or sitting at a cyber kiosk in a minimum security prison bored out of your skull and wondering what the fuck that asshole notforprophet’s been doing lately.

 

My words aren’t really in your mind.

Not really.

You’ve opened your mind to perceptions.

You’re digesting symbols, absorbing energy, encountering the arcanum.

What once were my words somehow may now be activating a inner voice within.

Does that voice sound like me?  Like you?

Or is there no voice at all because your soul firewalls the extraneous?

 

I’m no longer here, wherever 'here' was once.

Not really.

I wrote these words long, long ago.  Felt the pain, then let it go.

Perhaps before blogging was even ever envisioned.

Certainly before Romeo wooed Juliet.

And now she breathes no longer.

O evil vial,  O trusty knife.

As Hurricane Katrina hit, I came down with the flu.  And just as its remnants passed through and by yesterday, and the sun returned, I revived entirely and became suddenly invigorated as I took to running in Dreamland again.  Just a strange personal coincidence, I guess.

 

The violence and lawlessness that is now epidemic in New Orleans provides the government precise support for its rationale to never announce an imminent asteroid collision with the Earth.  Granted, New Orleans is an already actualized, localized “loss of the world” for the unfortunate remaining there while the response to an announcement of an imminent asteroid collision would be entirely anticipatory and worldwide.   Still, when masses of amalgamated people face the “loss of the world”,  whether that world is the hood or the globe, whether the loss is actual or imminent, the brutality of lawless selfishness will manifest and attempt to dominate matters at hand.  And given that the lead time on announcing an  asteroid collision could be anywhere from 1 day to 15 years, the government simply will not, by proxy of an announcement, initiate an anticipatory panic that would lead to absolute terror, lawlessness, and societal dissolution.

 

But I wish they’d have a policy to reveal such to us at least one day  in advance.  A “One Day to Live” directive that admits: “Yeah, we knew about this killer asteroid 10 years ago, decided we couldn’t do anything about, decided telling the public would lead to a panic that would usher in a Reign of Darkness and Terror, so we kept it our own dirty little secret.  Our advice to you now?  Don’t go to work tomorrow.  Take the day off.  Enjoy yourselves.”

  

The overriding health case for the use of extra virgin olive oil.

  

The newly-found health benefits implicit in consuming coffee.

  

There’s 87 million internet users in China.  And nude web chats are a hot commodity.

Xanga's new search engine really works.  It just helped me find a few mentions of "notforprophet" in others' posts that I might have otherwise missed.  There does seem to one limitation, however: It indexes back only over the last month.  So, it is only a "very current" search.  Yet better than nothing at all.  Or Xanga's old, buggy search that would furnish no results  if there were too many  hits.

It still makes my Atomz blog search that I've designed for my own site here (over in the left module) useful since that search indexes virtually my entire presence here from 2000 - today, not just the past month.

Just for the hell of it, I just peformed a comparative "hit" search on both Xanga and on my own site...

Here are the Xanga hits:

love     4,452,773
hate     1,179,756      about 4:1

sun        242,793
moon       86,239      about 3:1

god     1,028,311
satan       27,096       about 40:1

day     4,586,083
night    2,471,243      about 2:1

life       1,879,879
death     256,436       about 7:1

war       136,991
peace    572,840       about 1:4

Comparing my emphasis (as proxied by "hits") to Xanga's overall results for these same "hits::

love    254
hate     49                 about 5:1

sun     182
moon   62                 about 3:1

god     98
satan    8                   about 12:1

day     307
night   232                about 1.3:1

life     339
death 178                  about 2:1

war    105
peace  42                  about 2.5:1

*looks up*  I score proportionally higher on love, but also on death and war.  It would seem (though I'm too lazy to do the stats) that I mention life and the sun and the moon more often than the average blogger.  hrmmm.

Speaking of stats, this speaks for itself.

Fastest growing blogs and blog networks
	Unique audience, 000
Blog / Network	January 2005	July 2005	Growth
MSN Spaces	311	3,257	947%
fark.com	488	795	63%
Blogger	8,684	12,599	45%
Xanga.com	4,810	6,862	43%
Daily Kos	348	476	37%
The Smoking Gun	1,706	2,243	31%
Gawker	411	531	29%
TypePad	3,557	4,555	28%
engadget	630	787	25%
Boing Boing	506	605	20%
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Except I'll make one observation: the outrageous MSN Spaces growth?  I'm prepared to bet that that much of that is due to their new official presence within the Chinese blogosphere.

Update: searching Xanga for "xanga sucks" vs. "i love xanga":

xanga sucks     2754
i love xanga     1378

Ingrates us!  ha.

Update with breaking news insight:  Katrina - Category 5?  No, as my daughter Starrr16 just remarked, it's now "Category Die". 

Live in New Orleans or thereabouts?  Want to 'stick it out'?  Just remember that the bayous are filled with millions of poisonous snakes that will fill the flooding waters inland and that hundreds of casualites likely soon to be found will not haved drowned, but be will have been snake-bitten.

It was good to run today.  Alone.  Honest.  True. 

 

You might assume that I ran where I usually do.  In Dreamland.

 

But that’s not entirely accurate..

 

I ran, also, across your lawn.  Through your garden.  In a trial for the Olympic marathon trials.  Downhill against a mortal enemy.  Hopping over a rattlesnake.  Heart beating in lust for the Earth’s nakedness.  Transcending a yell of dubious support that echoed “Run, Forrest, run.”  Breaking my shackles.  Avoiding tackles.  Sidestepping debacles. Catching sight of you looking out your window.  Yeah, that was me in the shadow of sunshine hiding beneath the illumination of eternity. Dripping with sweat.  Proud to be wet.  Mad to convene, converse, immerse myself in the unwoetocome.

 

Red.

 

Pink.

 

Misty violet-blue.

 

Dusk.

 

Gone.

Had I company now, it would be much better.

 

But I have no company.  Yet it is still good.

 

Felt again like a warrior running today.  Even more so like a guerrilla fighter. 

 

I spent several years as a youth studying guerrilla warfare and tactics, counterinsurgency, evasion  and escape, special weapons and tactics.  What’s the most important lesson I learned?  That farmers, woodsmen, or basically any sort of outdoorsmen make the best fighters.  What do you think most of our revolutionary fighters did for a living?  Or how about the Viet Cong that defeated us in the last war?   Farmers.  What about the average American soldier today?  Probably 90% or more are pure urban.  I’d bet over half never even gone true wilderness camping before joining the service. 

 

You see, the average regular army soldier, with his urban bent, fights both the enemy and the elements,  However, while the seasoned guerrilla also fights the enemy,  his typically more rural bent disposes him to employ the elements to his greatest advantage. 

 

Take George Washington, the farmer general, for example. 

 

He was one of the greatest guerrilla generals that ever lived!  Once upon a time, on one side of the Delaware River, were the British: a superior force in raw numbers, weaponry, and traditional military discipline.  On the other side of the Delaware was George with his rotting teeth, forces in anguish, and options few. 

 

The British knew they could defeat the Americans and extinguish the rebellion anytime, if they took the battle to them and ferried across the Delaware.  But they dreaded the heavy losses in casualties that ferry-crossing a river while fighting would entail.  So they planned instead to wait until the Delaware River froze over sometime in January or February, then cross the frozen  river, and end the insurgency with a minimum of British causalities.  Brilliant! 

 

But George knew that.  Nobody had to tell him.  He was a farmer and knew that kind of stuff instinctively.  So what to do?  What to do? 

 

Wait and face certain defeat?.

 

No.  Embrace the element as it is (was).  Don’t wait upon it.  Turn it, instead, to one’s only advantage.

 

Of course, it helped  that the Prussians or Hessians or whatever the hell those German-for-hire forces in the British camps were called were all Catholics who traditionally got stinking drunk around raging campfires on Christmas Eve…

 

On the other hand George and his band faced…

 

Deadly cold.  Darkness.  A treacherous crossing.  Uncertainty.

 

Embrace the element.  Be like the wind, and the water, and the sky, and the trees and blend and blend and blend…

 

Such was the great guerrilla general and his ragtag half-regular force’s  victory.

 

As I have said that the Tao has said that Nature has whispered before:  “Darkness within darkness.  The gate to all mystery.”

I’ve got the feeling that a lot of people are now looking to the end of summer here in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere.  But I just ran my 5+ miles in Dreamland in honest-summer stride and now continue to enjoy a perfect summer evening R&R-ing on a sun-smirched hillside and so happy to be alive.  In other words, it’s all good in the hood.

 

You know, I do some of my clearest thinking while running.  I really do.  My senses grow sharper, my memory gets keener, my sympathetic affections surge, and my synthetic pragmatism outs.

 

I’ve been meaning to say something but thought it might be taken in the wrong way.  But now I’ve realized there is no wrong way.  There’s only the way you choose and choose to respond.  Learn or die.  Experience or experiment.

 

 

So…it  occurs to me, from my own experience, that woman are always right.

 

And men are always wrong.

 

But wondering is beautiful.  And everyone enjoys a good song.

A love that craves to affair but fails is only a strange tease.

 

  —by the grave of Irene Love Wade , 1885-1966

 

 

Give freely.  And if you can help it, take nothing with odd strings attached.

 

  —by the grave of Priscilla Thompson,  1942-1970

 

 

Enjoy the view.  For you are me.  And I am you.

 

  —by the grave of  “The one whom we remember”

 

Ha.  I guess I'm finally officially a stranger here to Xanga.

I just checked "Featured Content" and didn't recognize a single soul by namesake. I imagine, if I came to any of their attentions, it would be mutual.

"darkness within darkness, the gate to all mystery"

    -tao te ching

Why does is always feel, even though in your heart you know it’s not true, that when someone doesn’t love you anymore, that they never really loved you in the first place?

 

I have observed lately that nasty, disgruntled, annoyed, angry, sarcastic, discontented and/or vituperative bloggers on Xanga tend to be more popular than the decent person who writes a decent blog.  I guess that’s the equivalent of sensational or “bad” news winning out over “good” news in the general news media.  And you’re a asshole with no life if you don’t want to agree with me.

 

Something good is happening!  Something good is happening!    No, I don’t know where at or to whom; I’m just psychic enough to know that it IS happening.

 

I was wondering if I could get into the World Record book as “the person most esoterically deserving of being here who will never get here”?

 

I was, after all, psychically-involved in the death of two Popes.  I think that’s a record, though it’s hard to be sure.

 

Did someone just say “give me an A!” ?

 

Amreica’s like any lover: love her or lose her.

• George Will,  the brightest of political enigmas, made a great point on a Sunday morning talk show yesterday (that I happened to be watching).  He said that insurgencies like that in Iraq usually take an average of 9 years to quell and they almost always end with amnesty being given to the surviving insurgents. Great.  Our men get to die for another seven years and then many of those who have and will have participated in killing them get to become “good citizens” again.
   
  
• A cascade of thoughts: The psychic psychoanalyst C.G. Jung once asserted that 4 is the perfect archetypal number.  Today’s the (catholic) Feast of the Assumption.  Upon this day, Mary, the Un-sinning One is taken undead into Heaven.  If that’s not a guarantee of Godhood, I’m missing something.  Someone who’s totally pure, never sins, and never dies?!  Don’t you see?  On this, the Feast, Mary hacks the Trinity and completes the deal.  The Divine Pattern is perfected as a quartet.  Jung is awesome.  
   
  
• I’ve worked 24 of the last 29 hours.  Sorry, I can’t tell you what I was doing.  But I’ve returned now to Dreamland, anyway, to jog and blog and watch the Sun set.  Ah, the Sun!   It has and will always fascinate me from whence to wither!

Are you ready to play?  Today?

Ran 5 miles in record 94 dog-sun degree heat yesterday.  5 more in 90% humidity this morning.

I'm ready to kick some ass today.

But if you want to come and pitch, we could have fun and play.

Desire is broken.  And that’s a good thing.  Providing the cast of desire was the pursuit of an illusion. But what of those delicious, reassuring somewhat illusionary assurances of love that can shelter you through the hurt of this life and into the fog of beyond?

 

Hunger is shattered.  And that’s good thing.  Providing that the urge to eat was overly-contrived beyond any genuine metabolic need.  But what of the smell of popcorn wafting one’s way?  Or the spoon with frosting, or bowl of raw cookie dough begging for a taste?

 

Judgment is suspended.  And that’s a good thing.  Providing that the flight to a conclusion was the over-reaction to a misperception of  another’s intent to innocently act, not attack.  But what of the fierceness of the true warrior in facing the most formidable and irreconciling enemy? 

 

Ah, judgment is even better debarred then.

 

Empty your boat entirely and you’ll sail thereafter forever unchallenged around the world. 

I’ve run thousands of miles in Dreamland over the last four years.  But today I did something I never did before while running.  I made music.

 

Of course, my feet pounding the pavement have always had a barely audible rhythm.  The ever-accompanying runner’s thump. thump. thump…   Rather monotonous.   Self-hypnotic.  And very martial.

 

But today, along my running ways, I came upon a rather handy tree-debris-fallen type of stick upon the advancing cemetery trail.  That I, for the hell of it, impulsively kicked ahead of me.  And it resonated, as it bounced upon the asphalt and then aside and into the graveyard, in a series of stunning wood-chimed clangs.  And being a guy that always pays special attention to stunning-kind of things, I naturally turned around, ran back and picked it up.  But laying right next to it (your left, my right), was another handy stick.  In a perfectly matching length.  Begging for similar involvement.  So I picked them both up.  And resumed my running.

 

 

Now I’ve never played drums before.  I guess I could have held and carried both sticks apart while I ran, like individual batons in a relay race, and never let them tangle.  But, instead, I playfully angled them in upon one another and let them bangle, clink, clatter, and jangle just in and by the act of running.  In other words, I wasn’t banging the sticks together with intentional arm movements.  Rather, I let the free movement of my run bring the sticks together. 

 

I was stunned!  The air was filled with a bash of sticks.  My body was making music on the run.  Strange rhythms. Unpredictable tones.  Running-man chimes!

 

As I proceeded along, I began experimenting with holding the sticks longer and lower, and then shorter and higher, and discovered new consequent patterns of chiming, thumping, tapping, and bumpety-gumpety ta-tupping. 

 

How fucking marvelous a discovery this was for me!  ha.  As I ran, I forgot all about the typical fatigue induced by running and became totally audibly and vibrationally absorbed in this newly-found transformation of energetic self-expression.

 

What did you say (just think)?  After you really hear the music, you’re never the same?  

 

You know. 

 

 

• I've begun drinking a Great Lakes beer called Nosferatu. 
  
• It's self-described as "The Beer with a bite. Aptly named after the notorious German vampire from the 1920s.  This deep red ale is highly topped and rich with flavor, yet remarkably balanced from start to finish."
  
• (notice the biting disdain that Nosferatu casts upon my drinking his beer out of  a CocaCola glass.)

• I've taken lately to running in Dreamland cemetary just in black, or (here) for a change, in Escher-ghostly charcoal and black.

• With every passing year, Goldie Hawn, as an actress, grows in my bestowed esteem and admiration.
  
• She never does seem to get older in real life, does she?  What's up with that?!

• (from Death Becomes Her)
  
• Don't you dare try to profile me by this blog.  Offenders will be punished under the glow of the upcoming full moon.

A stitch in time will never be there when ya needs it in a torn universe.....

Author.... yet to be announced

In response to benevolentmitch's comment (above) to me in my last post:

Nice ride, this Xanga-thing.

Had me going for awhile.

Up the slope of romance.

Down the slip of heartbreak.

Like the incessant hills I run in Dreamland—

Up and down, up and down, around and around.

 

Enough.

 

Time now to chase my shadow into the woods  and lose it there.. 

Or stick pine needles into the ground  pretending to stitch-mend the ever-oozing Earth.

Eat only when I’m hungry, drink only when I’m thirsty, piss when I need to.

 

Sit, soak up a beer, and wonder what next to do.

Realize that soaking up that beer was the doing of that next.

Find inspiration is such zazen and springboard on to more lucrative matters…

 

To paraphrase Marx: there’s nothing to lose; just a world to win.

And understand that though there’s a little bit of the world *here*, it’s just a wee bit.

 

Imagine yourself a bird with dinosaur wings, defiantly imagining, in one moment, all of the feathers that have ever fallen and will ever fall from the sky.  Now fly.

• "DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms." - Hans Arp
  
• "DADA speaks with you, it is everything, it envelops everything, it belongs to every religion, can be neither victory or defeat, it lives in space and not in time." - Francis Picabia
  
• "Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police." - Richard Huelsenbeck
  
• Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away. - jack kerouac
  

Wondering is Wandering.

Last night, in a state of pre-sleep neblouslessnes, I suffered a tear in the fabric of consciousness. The seams in my normal raggedy andy ragdoll head are usually well-sown, but last night a few became undone and allowed an influx of otherness. Though it was probably lost to me, I imagine there might have also been a leaking outflux to the universe of my own shadowy threshold ragdoll intimations which would probably otherwise have come to constitute a Xanga blog. Oh well, all’s a tradeoff in the balance of energies and nothing’s ever really lost.

I was prepared to totally indulge in the psychic trepanning thus visited upon me, but it seems that a secret seamstress pulled my rag-thread seams back tight but a little further into the night. And with that nurturing I fell asleep. Damn that nurturing! But something tells me that it was a reflex to conserve sanity and stop my shadowy threshold ragdoll bleeding. Damn that sanity!

There are doors of perception to other worlds - worlds yet strange and un-unified with our “own.” And I seek their opening. Much as the microscope prior to its invention was the unknown key to an unknown world that there before, except by some mystical visionaries, was considered pure chimera and fantasy, so too, do I believe, that we are on the threshold to finding new doors to unseen worlds providing new discovery.

For there is, must always be, new discovery, in this, our Golden Eternity.

I just extinguished a small though promising fire in Dreamland that someone had more than likely inadvertently but apparently started by tossing a lit cigarette upon a richness of dry needles lying beneath a pine tree.

 

All I can say is that if you don’t know how to extinguish your burning butts properly, swallow them.

 

Before that I was running more miles. More miles, that is, than any other sane person seems to run in this swelter called weather.  Was that an improper use of “other” ?

 

There are lots of little bugs scurrying about in the air today.  More so than in many weeks recent.  It’s not that it’s any cooler or wetter and so more hospitable today.  In fact, it’s hotter and dryer than yesterday. (which, too, was hot and dry—thus adding fuel to the fire.)  And the crickets, too, are much noticeably louder today than yesterday or anytime before.  And so the season progresses.

 

Life goes on!

 

Ha.

 

It’s just so amazing.

I just got done running 5 miles and then spent a bit of time electronically paying my bills from atop Tombstone Hill (my latest nickname for my  Dreamland perch atop a hillside with a view overlooking Lake Erie.)  I think in paying my bills here I make the dead feel good, in that they can celebrate boisterously, even mockingly, that that’s one thing they’re no longer burdened with.

 

Last week was a kick-ass week turned mad.  It started off by me getting a stellar mid-year review at work.  Then I cracked the cover on some cyber-spies and got praised for that.  I ran 25 miles despite the continuing 90-degree heat.  But by the weekend I was degenerate, self-indulgent, mind-wasting and was acting upon strictly unmentionable impulses.  Frankly, I never before realized that I was capable of pissing so much. 

 

Things are better now.

(I hear somebody ask: “Weren’t they ‘better’ then ?”  My reply: “No, they were exactly the same.”)

 

I got a prescription for dinosaur flu.  Got it from a psychiatrist friend just for the asking. But I never intend to use it personally.  Should the avian flu ever strike, the med is for my daughter.  Hitchcock was right: “Birds” is the ultimate horror scenario.  But if I go, I intend to take a birdshit load of those feathery therapods with me.

 

Summer—where has it gone?  Only three more months of it left.  (I’m projecting, by the current heat wave, that it won’t even seem like the beginning of Fall until November.)   There’s going to be a lot of wild weeds long-in-the-tooth by then. 

 

I thereby proclaim this “The Summer of the Droughted Weed.”

 

*resumes lotus position on Tombstone Hill while basking under the Sun*