On The Internet

But what you download is only a small part of what you are.

For Best Effect

don't be mean with it, but use sparingly-
a little goes a long way to lubricating life.

Why, To Save Something,

do we always have to put a value on it first?
Every time we put a price on a preservation
whether in nature or as part of the human environment.
We thrust the impetus for the preservation to the richest,
when those that have the most never have it through altruism.
Quite the opposite. Their wealth is built on thrift at the expense
of the lives of others, human and non-human
and in one way or another their accumulated wealth
is what caused the original decline.
Money needs nature far more than nature ever wanted the economy.

In The Food Chain All Flesh Is Grass

India annually produces about 12 million tonnes
of flesh unfit for human consumption, which is left
to rot in the open air of the countryside.
Vultures used find what humans left behind a peculiar treat,
and consumed what was rotten.
Between 1992 and 2002 the Indian vulture population
from 40,000,000 birds to about 20,000 due to poisoning
from anticoagulant chemicals left in dead cattle.
Wild dogs replaced the vultures in the revised food chain,
and increased their numbers increased by 7 million.
In addition to tidying up the fleshly detritus humans left behind
the dogs were repositories for diseases humans could get
and now every year 5000 people who lived
when the vultures had pride of place die of dog bites.
In the food chain all flesh is grass, food for others to eat.
Even human flesh will get cheaper for those who can think
for others being less thoughtful,
as the pecking order in the food chain collapses.
,  

Divided By Grammar

In the 1940s George Bernard Shaw
said 'England and America are two nations
divided by a common language'. Every time
I hear this quote I reacquaint myself
with that he missed;a much older, closer
and deeper division of country by language.
One that we enjoy avoiding. Bisected by history in 1453,
the English and the French continue to share
so much of each others language. But each divides,
one against the other by each country changing the meanings
of words they share, and adopting different grammar.

In Bars And Airports

life is what is goes on around people
who spend too long, being distracted
by their advanced mobile phones
because the device attached to them
is the ultimate in-between space distraction.

A Meditation For Holocaust Day

Given a choice of histories that normalise dystopia
I would take eugenics over slavery every time.
Through an overwhelming inequality
both ideas have generated a lot of suffering.
Where governments have found the resolve
to prove both ideas immoral they have both
been legislated out of sight but not out of existence.
Neither idea is totally gone. Slavery is as old as property,
and is as self regenerating as property rights too.
It has been part of the human economy since the end
of hunter/gatherer societies, over 8000 years ago. 
Eugenics is a now discredited science,
destroyed by its links to the Nazi Party
and their scapegoating of jews, gypsies, homosexuals,
communists, Jehovahs witnesses, and others.
As a failed theory I like it because it was proved
to be spectacularly flawed and rigged science.
Since 1948 anyone who has tried to re-start
the science of superiority has been laughed out of their laboratory.
Hubris has had to revise slavery, to create new inequalities behind which to hide. 

The Limits Of Futurism

Futurism was the idea of living faster than life
through drugs and technology. Often now I listen
to people and I hear them talk faster than they think.
I have to work hard to fill my part in their/our dialogue.
Their speech technique is everyday futurism,
they leave no gap in their talk for the minds of others.
The better to hide their own lack of mind.
Leadership used to be about creating deference,
modern leadership is about combativeness;
drowning the led into silence by flooding them with words.
Humans are not rats (we carry far more disease
and are far more destructive than rats are or ever were)
and part of our disease is to believe that life is a race;
the faster we live the more poisonous we become,
the more we cause the extinction of other species.
I prefer slow living and I agree with Mae West-
'Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly'.

The Work Ethic

Many people find that if they have to suffer,
 then being paid to suffer is better than going unpaid
 whilst suffering, but the money is a poor compensation
 for their loss. By the time they find this out it is usually
too late to remake the choices. Whatever their pay
(or the lack of it) they are too old to adopt a vocation.     

Keep Up Your Interests

'If you always do what interests you
at least one person is pleased'
-Katherine Hepburn

Self Help

just got easier.

For That New Sense Of Realism

The New Comfy Chair 

Protect And Survive

In the past I have worshipped in churches where the belief
was that sodomy was the sole sin of Sodom, and Gomorrah.
Not a word was spared in any sermon on how inhospitable
at any other level those two cities might have been.
Equally denied into silence was the perversity of the story
where the proof of Lots hospitality to his protective angels
simultaneously doubled as a fathers weakness
in giving a baying drunken crowd the virginity his daughter.
In the church the sole focus was on how well the angels
protected Lot, the better for him to make his exit.
When Lots wife looked back she froze in grief
for her lost daughter. Her condemnation was even greater
patriarchal defensiveness against being human and tender.
In the churches I once attended they feared all talk
of Lot consenting to his daughter being pushed
into brutal under age sex, even though it is integral
to the story. Their biggest unspoken fear was how
Lot lived through a survivalist environment by sacrificing
his family, because it reversed their idea of hospitality,
where strangers were always more worth sacrificing
to protect the loyalty to family and tribe. Never mind
that the gospel truth of about learning to love our enemies.

The Facebook Generation,

who define themselves by their multiple on-line identities,
are said to be the first generation to have multiplied reality.
This is simply not so, what they see as ever more identity
is more likely increased division and compartmentalisation.
I know from my limited little past, my likes and choices,
and even more the many decisions made for me,
how unaware I was when I let others make my life,
the way young make up their on-line life now.
In my present relative maturity I prefer my life
to be singular. In my past each of my likes was made
into a separate identity, and the likes of others-
the fantasies of virtue from the previous age-
where innocence meant being empty, a blank page-
reduced me to an unwholesome nothing.
Aged 25 I turned, against the old divisions
and against the parental lies. I walked away
from the bundled of hypocrisies called 'heterosexual marriage',
which reduced the self to the idea of two people staying together
to become each others property.
Instead I sought unity outside of property, the hard way.
Through that well known dystopia 'The Gay Community'
where life (like commitment) is always somewhere
over the rainbow, and like Heaven,
nobody ever reports back from being there.

I Would Find Kitsch

easier to accept if  there were less of it.
But I know with my hopes I am missing its point.
Kitsch is the process of a high level of productivity
allied to minimal thought, to use a high volume
of materials, all the more to closely mirror
the economic model it is built on.
This industrial scale creativity, like all capitalism,
will make the most driven people famous.
The light of their fame will casts long shadows
over the many, for whom living in the small scale
can only mean a life of relative anonymity.

Are Humans

attracted to supermarkets the way dinosaurs
were once attracted to extinction?
With both the process of being drawn in involves
reduced brain size, and out-of-scale living.

If Dogs Could Talk

It would seem as unnatural as if  a human had decided
on a species change. But as Karel Capek put it in
'Dashenka'  'If dogs could talk we would find it
 as hard to get along with them as we do people'.
 What I want to know is if they learned to talk 
would they lose their listening skills? When I
 had a bond with  Oscar it was neither a fantasy
nor a hallucination for me to believe that he
 absolutely understood me.  

Note For The January Sales

And when we face the ultimate recession we will know it
by the fact that advertising would stop
 for there being nothing to advertise. 

Courtesy And Attentiveness

When I was young and naive I was taught
when say 'please' and 'thank you', and how
to not get in the way, quietly. And I obeyed.
I learnt to not ask questions that nobody
wanted to answer, of which there were lots.
I am glad I learnt my manners.
In adulthood they help me hold the attention of other adults,
and I learned how be rude with sophistication.
But the older I got the more my naivety wore thin,
through more questions being allowed,
and even more-answered. But only with lies,
and the bigger the lie the more the truth mattered.
I was rhetoricaIly accused of 'being stupid',
by those those closest to me who previously bade me speak
only when spoken to. Since a dignified retreat
from the bad manners and paradoxes of  my accusers
was impossible I went from a child-like naivety to sullen inattention,
with no intervening period. In a culture of lies
(what other culture is there?) detachment is valid defense.

Bisexuality

is not so much doubling of the chance of a date
on Saturday night, as an increasing the number
possible consequences, including the chance
of later being divided by personal loyalties
more disparate than you are able to serve well.

Politics

is the art of rewarding laziness
by disguising it as hard work.
Leadership is about making light
of charisma, whilst melding charm
with personal conviction,
sufficient to ward off charges of corruption.

Acting Male

'Often a man can act the helpless child in front of a woman
but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most
like a helpless child'-F Scott Fitzgerald

For That Sense Of Balance

and find out which of those ideals outlasts the other.

It Is Cupboard Love

to anticipate that the generosity of others
is going to be more than our reliability in return.
But we normalise this imbalance.
Some call the normalisation forgiveness,
whilst in truth the cupboard-emptying
is more a mis-description of forgetfulness.
When our forgeting becomes totally consistent
then our  disadvantage becomes clear.
What happens when we see that for our
taking the generosity towards us declines?
Memories do not decline, instead with age
they curdle, sharpen, and bite us where
we have quenched beyond repair
the good will that once held us.
Recollecting quenched support proves
that the past is unrepairable. But knowing
the damage can warn us about our future. 

The Final Solution

Is it democratic progress
to go from the belief that fathers
will choose the sins their offspring
will inherit* to accepting that children
will choose their own sins? Regardless
of what their fathers want? Discuss,
and politely, please....

Because the more aggression there is
in the discussion the more it will seem
as if the childrens sins are their fathers
choice, after all. The most democratic
solution is to question what to bequeath/
inherit and to choose to not have children
and try to own less. This would reduce
the need for discussion, increase politeness
and leave fewer people with whom
to share what ought not to need saying.  



*a paraphrasing of Exodus Ch 20 V 5, Ch 34 V 6-7
and Deutronomy Ch 5 V 9

Signs Of Greater Age (13)

Always hoping for new lovers and friends,
but hoping that whatever their gift for you
is going to be, their generosity of spirit
and humour outlasts their athletic prowess. 

The Prime Of Somebody Elses Life

In boarding school, forty years ago
colour television was a novelty, though
many of the broadcasts were in black
and white. Even now I cringe inside
at how cried in front of other boys
when no staff were about, after viewing
'Robinson Crusoe'. Its theme music
made me feel wretched and homesick.

But to improve on all that, 8mm versions
of some popular films were screened on
the white anaglypta of the common room wall.
One such was 'The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie'.
I heard the staff openly worry about the effect
of briefly exposing the boys to the naked breasts
that there were one scene in the film.
They need not have worried about the young,
I was one, and we drank in images
as if we were taking sweets from strangers,
without discernment. The more forbidden the image
the less we understood it, but the more attractive it was.
Looking back now I wish they had wondered more
at the proto-fascism of the figure of Miss Brodie,
and the cheesy sub-plot of art teacher-falls-for-gardener.
The school never taught art, or had a gardening staff.
But if they had we would have been theirs for the taking.  

Heterosexuality Explained

'The true man wants two things,
danger and play.
For that reason he wants woman
as the most dangerous plaything.'
-Frederick Nietzsche

Multiplication And Defence

If the answer is more people having more guns,
the better to defend themselves from other people,
who are defending themselves from even more people
with even bigger guns, then the question must be...

'What is it that makes life, death and reason
seem cheap whilst making the domestic arms
industries of the world infinitely profitable?'

The New Yorker 1993.

Castles Built On Credit

The  credit crunch is less about
the prospect of debt repayment,
which powerful debtors can always defer,
and much more to do with the fear
that the foundatons of the worlds
most over developed ecomonies
are built on sand, and will never stand
the weight of what we have built on them.

Not Feeling Like Yourself?

'We forfeit three quarters of ourselves
to be like other people'-Arthur Schopenhauer

Markets Are Like Sharks

-both die when they become immobile.
Both have to move to find their prey,
without which they will not grow.
At the top of the food chain life
is so competitive that everything
below has to be consumed. Here
is the latest in what there was to eat.

Oh No, Not Again...

Well at least we can recycle some old new year resolutions we never completed. 

Small Ad

With thanks to Harland Miller

My Ideal Age

is old enough to know myself,
and still young enough inside
to be curious about other people.

The Blind Leading The Blinded

'Love is what happens to men and women
who don't know each other'-W. Somerset Maugham

In All The Wars

fought over a hundred years ago
90% of all deaths were military.
10% of the dead were civilains
and conscription always happened
in the end. Sure, ordinary people
suffered many privations during
and after the war, but survived.
Now the safest place to be in a war
is in the civil population of the attacking force.
Those civilians will suffer the propaganda,
as their soldiers go off to fight, but often
nothing worse.The world statistics for deaths
as a result of war have reversed to 90% of civilians
dying vs 10% of the military. Not only that but
in developed countries media led patriotism
ensures that the military who suffer and survive
are seen to be victims worthy of help,
for their efforts at killing others.
No matter that in their sufferings they were willing
and well paid, or that many others who suffered
far more were denied the choice of whether
or not to engage in war. The war came to them.

No Video Required

All the best music in the world
has spaces between the notes
and breathes in its silences.
This breath makes the music
easier to absorb. However new
in our ears such music seems,
it is older than the hills.
Such music will prompt pictures
in the mind that change with each listen.
No video is required for this music.

Better To Think Outside The Box

whilst you can, because when your are inside the box
 it may be too late to change your thinking.

Bad Sex

To get through bad sex we pretend, think anything-
count sheep jumping gates whilst faking orgasm.
The more we fantasise the better we appear to endure,
the more we are forced to fantasise even more,
for being stuck in the rutting. Whilst in our heart
of hearts we would be much happier doing nothing.

Drugs For Everyone

The next time a politician wants a bit of theatre
on their own terms, and to play with the public
for their own gain by calling for 'a debate on...  ',
and they choose the subject of illegal drugs
then maybe who ever wants to say the present law
is an ass will put this way; 'All drugs are safe;
it is the misusers of drugs (particularly alcohol)
who are unsafe for misusing them'.
The response would run something like
'We agree with you minister that they are not just unsafe
for themselves but dangerous for others-their dependents,
co-workers and community. So minister by all means
use the law against unsafe drug users, and abusers
of substances who abuse those in their care.
But leave alone the people who take their drugs safely'.
The safe should decide for themselves who is safe
and who is not. That should end the debate nicely. 

And You Will Know Them By Their Medicine Cabinets

This picture was taken after Andy Warhol died, in Jan 1987.
 It changed how the public viewed him, because he was so 'private'.
 At an estimated 50 items it seems Andy Warhol
was either 1) very ill throughout his life, 2) very vain,
 or 3)he was the most creative hypochondriac in art history.

My Problem With Multi-tasking

is not that I can't do it.
I can. It is more that the jobs
I am expected to perform
simultaneously are jobs
that I (or any sane person)
would not want to do,
neither separately nor all at once.

Sinead O'Connor

said 'I have full time career being myself'.
I know what she means. Every day I find
that I have a big enough job just being who I am,
never mind attempting gainful employment. 

The Outsiders Guide To Wisdom

'People demand freedom of speech
as a compensation for the freedom of thought
they seldom use'-Soren Kierkagaard

When Life Alarms Us

'Education is the ability to listen to almost anything
without losing your temper'-Robert Frost