I’m keeping it simple:
- Write every day.
- Clean house every day.
Having taken yesterday off from everything–including writing this–I feel better already. Let’s see how it goes.
Category Archives: Personal
Fun Facts about ME!
The Once and Future American Gods
I understand our situation now.
As followers of Jesus leave him for the Trump cult, Jesus’s power weakens as Trump’s grows. When Jesus finally figured out there was a demon inside Trump, he tried an exorcism, which started okay until it turned out there were way more demons than anyone knew. Now the demons just keep on coming, because the Trump cult has used their greater power to prop the portal to hell open.
And as is traditional, those demons are fleeing into herds of swine who run themselves off a cliff, screaming.
That is why I prefer science fiction to fantasy: Happier endings.
“Thoughts and Prayers”: I love this song. Don’t misuse it.
This is a wonderful, humane, sorrowful song. I love it so much. And I get angry as hell when I see you misconstrue it:
A lot of you don’t seem to understand who this line is directed to:
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers
So let me break it down for you:
It is aimed at the politician who offers thoughts and prayers because he plans to do nothing more. It is not aimed at the victim’s mother who is trying to live through another minute any way she can.
It is aimed at Karen from Corporate HR peddling BS when you know the job killed your co-worker. It is not aimed at the guy next to you in the meeting who found the note and still can’t sleep.
In short: It is aimed at the guilty. It is not aimed at the innocent.
One of my oldest friends in the world spent over thirty years in the Park Service. He’s jumped into deathtraps more times than I’ve skinned my knee–and I’m a clumsy SOB! Whenever I heard about a fire in the West, he was on my mind, all the time. He sure had my thoughts, and if I were the praying kind, he’d’ve had my prayers. Because I cared about him. Thoughts and prayers that express care are Good.
For those who offer thoughts and prayers instead of caring? Because they don’t care? Let’s sharpen their thoughts and prayers up real good so they stick real well.
The Daisy Bates College of Arts and Sciences and the Fulbright-Faubus Center for Global Arkansas Studies
What to do about J. William Fulbright’s long history of active acquiescence* to white rule in the South?
Of course his name should come off UA-Fayetteville’s College of Arts and Sciences. He’s the wrong symbol, a warning sign about using intellectual ends to justify political means. And the proper replacement is also clear. I give you:
The Daisy Lee Gatson Bates College of Arts and Sciences
In 2000, the Arkansas Historical Association polled its members as to the most influential figures in Arkansas history. The first was Bill Clinton, as you would expect. Next were Orval Faubus and J. William Fulbright, and fourth was Daisy Bates.
It’s hard to argue with Bill Clinton in first place! But Daisy Bates is the logical choice for second.
Daisy Bates and those who fought with her prevailed over Fulbright and Faubus, the two faces of Arkansas segregation, the good cop with the fancy degree and the the bad cop with a year at a small, unaccredited school.
That’s second place by any accounting!
The change she and those who fought with her brought was far-reaching and touched every citizen of Arkansas, mostly for the better–and frankly, those who were made less well off by it, they mostly deserved worse.
Faubus and Fulbright both had their virtues. If you took a paring knife and cut out the racism out of both men, you could Frankenstein them into a fairly decent human being. Fulbright was a generally positive figure in foreign policy and education, and he didn’t much go out of his way to advance segregation. Faubus made significant advances for Arkansans generally. He wasn’t even-handed, but he didn’t go out of his way to keep some of the benefits he brought from falling into black peoples’ hands. Mild praise. It’s what they deserve.
Since Daisy Bates won her fight against Fulbright and Faubus, the fruits of the good things those men did can be better distributed. If she’d lost–but she didn’t, and we need to act like it. We need to put her forward as our exemplar and claim the spoils of her victory.
She didn’t have a degree because there aren’t degrees in what she did, which is changing the world for the better. If we respect the power of ideas to turn the world around, then we pay tribute to those who wielded those ideas, with or without degrees.
That said, Faubus and Fulbright deserve study. They were polar opposites yoked by location, acquiescence to racism**, and not much else. Faubus was a deeply local politician; Fulbright was a national and global figure. And they grew from the same dirt.
It’s not that different from a Sam Walton or a Don Tyson, a Jerry Jones or a John Johnson, and it’s worth studying. Thus I also give you, as a subsidiary of the Daisy Bates College (the DBC at the UAF should be a useful catch-phrase), a whole new thing:
The Fulbright-Faubus Center for Global Arkansas Studies
Every year, they flip a coin to see whose name goes first. The domain name abbreviates them to ff or f-f so it doesn’t change. And the focus of the instituted changes for the year to local or global issues, all related to Arkansas.
Let’s see if Faubus and Fulbright can actually do right by race for once.***
*I’m being nice for once.
**Okay, twice.
***Third time’s a charm! And by “a charm” I mean “the fire next time”.
No One Trusts A Flincher To Hold Steady
The slogan people fought for in the streets is DEFUND THE POLICE whether you like it or not.
If your first act on hearing that is to flinch, your question should be, “Who taught me to flinch, and why?”
Your hands should hold steady when you are slapped, or who would trust your judgement in a fight?
History’s a slap on the side of the road as people pick and choose monuments to topple to the valley below.
If you say “My goodness!” before the trouble starts, you water down what people die for in their hearts.
If you can’t stand by the slogan DEFUND THE POLICE, don’t stand so, don’t stand so close to me.
A New Definition: Yourination, also spelled You’reination
Yourination [yur-in-A-shun], also spelled You’reination
(noun)
- The act of peeing on someone else’s fun because of variant spelling and grammar contained therein.
- Bless your heart.
Note: Both spellings are equally correct, even though one of them looks weird as hell.
synonyms: priggishness, tightassedness, triviality
See also: dick move
Defund The Police, Gwen Stacy!
Defund The Police! Does that slogan scare you? Maybe it should.
As Bob Dylan sings, “You’d better start swimming or get thrown like a stone.”
Maybe that’s a judgement on you.
A huge grassroots movement has put forward the demand Defund The Police. It’s put that slogan on the lips of every American.
If the leadership of the right had been given a gift like that, they’d hammer you every day with Defund The Police! Defund the Police! Why? Because they want to win. They know better than to stand in the way of, oh, the Tea Party. They co-opted them instead. They took the forms of their demands, their slogans, and used them to get some–not all–of what they all wanted. And they won.
So just this once, can we try not backing down in advance because the mean people will say the mean things? Can we defend our leaders who are in the streets fighting for us, instead of worrying about whether Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) can beg enough McNuggets of funding from fat rich fucks?
Because let me tell you: Those of you quibbling about the slogan are not leading. Neither are those quibbling at the top. Not any more.
If you’d been paying attention, you’d know Defund The Police is the compromise. The true demands of the heart? More like Fuck The Police! and Chinga La Migra! I don’t know how anyone who noticed that four policemen slowly murdered a man in a public display of terror can ever have hummed along with “I Shot The Sheriff” or “Murder In My Heart For The Judge” and not feel that too.
As Mary Jane Watson told Peter Parker, “Face it, tiger–you’ve hit the jackpot!” And we have. Just look at Generation Lockdown out in the streets. They’ve been told in every possible way their lives are disposable commodities. We can’t be bothered to keep them from being mass murdered other than by traumatizing them with fake mass murder drills. We can’t worry about them getting bullied in school or ending up on the street because their parents don’t care. We sign them up for a life of debt to get a degree that has become more a job license than an education, and tell them with a straight face that debt is for their own good. We watch as those younger than ourselves fail to thrive in the environment we created for them, and blame them for it.
Now they are doing something about it. They are doing something you didn’t. Whether you couldn’t or wouldn’t or whatever doesn’t really matter now. It’s being done.
The thing is, Mary Jane Watson has done shown up, and she is rocking our world. She’s a red-headed girl who burned a police car in New York City who’ll end up in prison for it.
And right now, as you stand by and dither as she sits in jail, wondering what you are going to do about what she fights for, you have chosen to be Gwen Stacy. Your father, the kind police commissioner, is already dead, and you are the sweet, doomed past.
It’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s not a perfect world, either, so that seems fitting.
Which one matters more? Which one will you do something about?
Devils, Satans, and Lucifers whose reality Unitarian Universalists must acknowledge
- I have met this Devil, many times. The song remains the same:
- Satan introduces the worship of crosses and crucifixion through empire:
- Lucifer arrives via an unintentional blood sacrifice and does a little good at an unconscionable cost:
- The Devil anticipates Stephen Strange telling Victor Von Doom, “I think you should be afraid, old friend.” Kind of:
- Constantine teaches the Devil’s Disciples to hide behind desks in gaudy uniforms and click down the halls of power in pantsuit and heels:
- Even when the Devil is dogging you down into the grave, he is still no more than a man, and you can still get your licks in on him while you go, even if all you can do is call attention to you as you are drowning, not waving, but drowning with a knee on your throat:
I know there’s more. This is what I have right now. If you have one, lay it on me!
A Literary or a Scientific Answer to a Human Question?
The current issue of UU World has a lovely long meditation on mortality and John Keats, “Loss, poetry, and the ballast of faith“, by Kathryn Hamilton Warren. Go on–read it. It’s not long and it’s worth your time. Then I’ll put a small tile on her mosaic.
Kathryn Hamilton Warren isn’t the only one of us who finds answers to deep human questions in art, especially the written word. I find them there, and chances are you do, too. I also find answers in science. So do you, probably, and so does Kathryn Hamilton Warren.
But what of my mother’s spirit, her energy, the person and the presence brought into being by that utterly contingent constellation of atoms? This, of course, is the great question, about which science says this:
There’s another way of answering this question, by going back to John Keats and one of his last works–“This Living Hand“:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
It’s built to be read aloud. The meaning falls into place after a time or two. Most criticism takes this to be Keats expressing fear of mortality, which is true enough, and goes on from there into considerably darker interpretations. Everyone’s a critic, right?
But that’s not how I read it. This poem says:
I am alive now (line one)
I will be dead soon (lines two and three)
You’ll think about me (line four)
You’d do anything to have me back (lines five and six)
It’s okay (line seven)
I’m still here (line eight)
That’s where Keats’ spirit went. It went onto paper and into the people he knew and out into the world generally while he lived. Now that his body is gone, he is still reaching his hand out to us to freely give us what he can:
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
We don’t have to make our “own heart dry of blood” for Keats, any more than he died for us. Keats lived, and reaches out to us today.
That’s where I figure my mom’s spirit is, and my dad’s, and someday mine. Holding my hand out, what’s left of me in the world, offering.
May Day: Happy or not, here it is
I’ve seen better May Days; but then, I’ve seen…