Here Today, Gone Tomorow

Evolution is a theory that is widely misunderstood
by a public, who misunderstand quite a lot -
because they are constantly talked at and sold things.
But within the scientific community, who define
The Truth of modernity through tests and analysis,
evolution is taken as a fact. I would actively trust
science more if I saw it follow the logic of evolution, itself.
Where genes and other materials mutate and die they help make
new life forms. In their mutability they make new building blocks
for the next stage of an ongoing creation. The uncompetitive death
of one type of matter gives life to another, and without that death
life, which is about change, would stop. The scientific narrative
I prefer would make that the central the premise. Everything
is important only in so far as it serves what comes after it,
which it can't  know about. This includes the scientists themselves.

  ;.

When I Visit Belfast

I expect sporadic dereliction:
on every third terrace a skip full of rubble
and a few collapsing homes.
Urban life involves recycling in such a way
that there must always be more to be done.
As I pass on the bus I am cheered
by fleeting glimpses of crumbling walls
curtained with ivy,
the green patches of abandoned gardens
and the pigeons that perch together
on the crossbeams of hollow houses.

From Stars To Memes,

to cosmologies we keep on making up,
why are we always making the future
the business of something, anything,
as long as it is well beyond ourselves?

The Echo Of Lightning

It is true, I am ungraceful person.....  

The Future Is Always Plastic

As modern design is driven by advertising so it multiplies
and becomes more  plastic. With choice widening we become
immersed in materials which preserve very well, but the designs
for them change, go out of fashion.
When materials were less mutable design changed less.
Whatever rotted recycled itself at a fitting rate.
Items fashioned from older materials have endured,
their design seems to mature, and become objects worth preserving.

In The War On Terror

And it has been that way for a thousand years.
From Abu Ghraib to the Vatican chambers of the middle ages
what the powerful now deny is how cannibalism
is more moral and proportionate than torture.
Generally, when cannibals ate human flesh
it was not out of hunger, but with a sense of  rituals
limited by custom, which implicitly echoed
the animal.origins of human beings in their empathy.

Whereas torturers are the servants of  faith and state elites,
and are the original un-living mentally dead, methodically
trapping random unwary victims in a sickness of  suffering,
the better to make their deadly orthodoxies the only life allowed.

This Is Not my Last Blog

but if it were I feel sure I would know how Thomas Aquinas felt.

Reading Other People, Reading Ourselves

Of all the professions, therapy is the one that most resists
objective understanding. Everyone who sees a therapist
will most likely see several during their life,
with the last one proving the most effective.
Because between all the other therapists
there is some unshiftable deadness that the client takes back.
If therapists were asked why so many of you?
Their collective defense would be that all but the last of them
'Were steps on the clients journey. The last was the arrival'.
The public use therapy unscientifically as if it were part astrology,
part fortune telling, with a bit of mind-reading thrown in.
In the past, through astrologists we believed more
for looking to the future. Now through therapy,
people half-blindly create different pasts
to make the present easier to live with.  

The New Private NHS Goes Awry

'Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess.
It made them over confident, so they took more risks.
Cocaine is perfect for the culture of exitement and drive
for more and more and more. It is a "more" drug.
Abuse of cocaine... ...led to the [banking] meltdown
and the Barrings crash. The NHS is now in the hands
of businessmen. Since the privatisation of services
employees will suffer....   yeah, pateients may die...
it will unquestionably get worse '-David Nutt

But he was thinking from his wallet.

Good News

for hypocrites - the size of anyones hypocrisy
is unimportant, the consistency of it is what counts.

Uncompetitive As I Am,

the nearest I get when the local hunt comes round,
excersising their horses and the hounds,
pursuing foxes that resist being found,
is collecting the horse shit they leave behind,
to place on the ground around of my roses. 

The Alcohol Consuming Classes

Some people will be gifted by life enough to say
'I have taken more out of  alcohol than it has taken out of me'.
But for the vast majority of the alcohol consuming classes
the exception proves the rule. The greater the consumption
the more returns diminish, which is why moderaton works.
Lest marraige be in haste, and repentence through relationships
be less a matter of grace and more a matter of infinite purgatory.

Offence Unlimited

I find it odd how in peacetime art multiplies so promiscuously
because of financial surplus, and how art is now industrialised.
We have made the artisan and personal seem antiquated.
It seems even odder when the public censorship
of a work of art becomes the measure of  its self importance,
whatever its quality. If the point of art is to be conceptual,
the better to make 'freedom of speech' so ontological
that it's freedom seems unintelligable, then please give me less.

Cleanliness Is Next To Beauty

Vogue models now eat tissue paper
to simultaneously stay thin and relieve
the symptoms of hunger; consequently
they have very thin, self wiping, arses.

Privilege Has It's Responcibilites

and one of them to make a kindness out the nonsense that is human inheritance.

Is Every Ism

about perpetuating itself to the exclusion of all else?
Modern feminism started moderately
with the suffragists and more militantly became suffragettes,
and still the campaign was more for wives of husbands
who owned houses to be able to vote
than for female servants to be enfranchised.
Like Marxists, rich women found their conviction
in 'taking control of the means of production',
with their wealth as its focus.

Thatcherism was less about saying 'everyone else is wrong',
more about acting so. When the press called Thatcher to account
she denied all ill effect of her belief, by insisting that
'My actions are common sense', and in in the next reshuffle
(they happened with the frequency of No 10 buses)
she would move sideways the ministers who was unpopular
because her actions. For a long time this disguised from everyone
including her that she was the problem.
Control through evasion and unreadability worked.
Now when British governments pass acts hostile
to the populous they extend Thatcherism,
by refusing to put up speakers in any and all media,
unless they have caused extreme agitation worth condemning.
They give statements instead, thus leaving the opposed
to talk among themselves as if they were not to be listened to. 

The Las Vegas Life

If John Steinbeck were writing today
surely one of his topics would be Las Vegas.
If he were not there then he would be
somewhere similar, cheerfully reporting
the small everyday victories over poverty
that the poor the world over celebrate.

To The Unknown Prime Minister

On the day of the funeral of Margaret Thatcher 
I cannot help but think of Clement Attlee.
As Prime Minister he achieved more and for more people,
in his short time in office than every other holder
of said office in the 20th century. And he achieved it
against the greatest possible odds.
Compared with the company he kept
he was the least histrionic holder of his office
anyone could imagine. When his daughter
placed his ashes next to the unknown soldier,
in Westminster Abbey in 1967
it was as if he had become the unknown prime minister. 

Dogs On Electricity

A big buziz. Mawnlower cable. Teethy teethy chew chew.
Burizz it say to me shaky my head. Teefies go yak attack
attack. Mawnlower got wire.Bad wire.Colin* go yelp yelp.
Mummydaddy come out pully cablers Collie fall they fink
dead. But Clunks no dead. Clunky live and shaky shake.
No more mawnlowers. Bitey wires no no.

all from 'My Epileptic Lurcher'

*what Connor the dog calls himself, Connor being his human name.

Beyond The Veils

When life is definitively unpleasant
then misremembering events is a natural defence.
The problem being that when therapists,
and others with similar skills listen, and hoke through
the veils of memory to test for truth and falsity,
they can't tell when where or why their patients originally
needed to lie to others and themselves.
Perhaps that it is why both therapist and client retreat
from the shared cognition of how life was for them both,
in its time both nakedly hostile and threatening
-and that is why both retreat from giving due thanks
for the strength to see past the need for all that aggression.  

Oh! For An Honest Accountant!

Perhaps my belief in the efficacy of wealth
would be more fulsome if when Adam Smith
wrote his theories about 'the market' as the sum
of all altruism, and made money the measure
of everything worth measuring, he had written
into his theory a Hippocratic oath for accountancy.
This would have encoded the values that would regulate
the acts that those invisible hands got up to.
But what value ethics when wealth sets the rules of power, and reality?

Irrationality In Excelsis

I have never grasped how with human overpopulation
of the world imminent, if not already here for too long,
and  already a catastrophe for species of animals
already extinct because of human land grabs,
how many societies continually insist that homosexuality,
sexual fantasy and other forms of non-procreative sex
are intolerable vices, punishable by death.
Nor do I see living alone, to make companionship
more consistently voluntary, and avoid friendship
being precondition to wanting to breed, as 'selfish' or 'anti-family'.    

From Israel To Belfast

fences take root in peoples minds to become
the internal walls that suspend the wars,
which also make 'communities'.
The media feed the locals on all sides
cliches about the past and myths
that have lost all flavour, to maintain
the local belief that the dividers remain 'peace walls'.
How better to sustain old enmities
by any other means than outright war?
How better to make 'cross community diplomacy'
each side repeating its losses to itself,
whilst pretending to listen the other side,
whilst having no empathy for anyone else
because they have none for themselves?

A Melancholic Confession;

My only teenage infatuation
was to be be accepted by Depression.

So That Was Why It Was Better

to avoid open disagreement with Margaret Thatcher...

Every Hero And Heroine

has heroes and heroines of their own,
and they know that in so far as putting others
on pedestals goes, the most heroic
are those who are held aloft by others
more in spite of, than because of, what they are.   

Home Ownership

just got harder to swallow.

Dementia

has now hit the media, everything new is in the news
and in loops and rolls itself on tickertape, so in bars
and public places nobody has to listen. When it repeats
it whizzes past so fast that no fact sticks in the mind
of the viewer for long enough for the news to matter.

A Tax On Words

Addictions are contingent on appetites,
mass production, and issues around
consent vs taboo.
And finally within Capitalism addictions rest
the respectability of corporate profit.
But the oldest and purest world addiction
 is still words, which as lies became legion,
They console us through philosophy and religion.
In the cacophony of the present day
would a tax on words become censorship? Or honesty?

Why Are Elections Like Shotgun Weddings?

Because

1-there is always one going off somewhere in the world.

2-voting is like is repeatedly losing ones viriginity, having forgotten
you still had it. Secrecy and misinformation surround both processes.

3-Foreplay is like electioneering. Neither prepares us for the final result.

4-The consequences of elections are like sexual experience, always oversold
and under estimated well before the count is finished.

Whilst in the media, choices are dictated by the worldly
who see that innocence is wasted on the innocent.
They would like their hands to be that clean,
but instead their hands will always be dirty.

Loneliness For The Unknown

-David Foster Wallace

Hope Is Horizontal

To sleep is to dream is to lie
and to lie is to luxuriate
in the unlived life.

The Canine Psychologist

Daddy got the angry. I see the daddy angry. It go about
him round and round yes yes like colours.Like the fing comes
out of the telly and the cooker. Like the fing goes round the
bad mawnlower wire. It goes bizz. Daddy got that yes yes
when he got the angry. I nuzzle the daddy till it goes away
Stop spinning. The daddy can break fings wif his angry.

borrowed without asking from 'My Epileptic Lurcher.

In French Car Parks

there are notices in the spaces reserved for disabled
that say to the able bodied who are tempted park there
'If you take my space, then have my disability', perhaps
the British Government would find such a scheme
worth adopting, to increase disability awareness.  

The Hope Of Now

The more my life is planned for me in the longer term
the more shabby and insubstantial it feels.
Even when I take my chances I know they can't last,
which leaves me feeling nearly alive in the moment.

Contrariness Inc

Dogs On Extra-terrestrial Life

Mummy finks urra peeps is crazy cause Mummy knows me
and the Blongo* can municate. But none of the Tlever peeps
finks that like science tests. So Mummy finks that id we cant
muinicate wif aminalies on our own planet what chance
have we got of municating with aliens from urra part of the
universe? None chance thats how mucy. Municate municate
no no.

*Connor the dogs name for his canine friend Bailey

taken from My Epileptic Lurcher, a cracker of a book.

Thinking Is Not Always An Error

but for those who need to fool the public
and each other in popularity contests
pluralistic ignorance is free,
on request. Costs, like consequences,
will have to be dealt with later.

Oh To Find The World Afresh....

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power,
but for the passionate sense of potential, [I should] wish for the eye
-which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.
I should wish for pleasures that never disappoint.
What is so sparkling, so fragrant a wine,
what is so intoxicating as possibility!'-Soren Kierkagaard 

Signs Of Greater Age (17)

Listening to the news on the radio and losing concentration
well before the end of the bulletin, even though it is brief,
because you are more interested in how it will be satirised
by comics at the end of the week than you are engaged
by what the news is actually telling you about life today.

One Of The Surprising Things

about depression is that it never recognises
 how it shapes the world it is part of.....

The Zero-Gain Sum Of Human History

Cain to Abel;'I hate you',
Abel to Cain;'Whatever....'
God to himself;'.......   '