When Ghosts Talk

One of the phrases I always find opaque
is when somebody comments on comments
they have made that equate to the rejection
of others and they say 'It is nothing personal'.
Does it mean that their rejection of others
is improved by their meaning it less?
Is it really somebody else doing the rejection?
Is the speaker just as impersonal with praise?
Or does the speaker merely never mean what they say?   

Vanity & Amateurism

are the twin gods
who when ever a few people
have to work together
in attempted altruism
will destroy the work
by breaking consensus.

Anti-Depressants

may help patients
to appear to cheer up.
But mostly the pills
don't cure their ills
but temporarily tame
their abnormalities.

Mismanaging

free will is very difficult,
it takes a life time,
if not many, to get it right.

The Lost & Found Of Life

The older we get the easier we find it
to lose things in public places-like children do.
But unlike our youth when we were bought for
from tight budgets, in old age we live in a world of choice
and surplus. There many losses are easy to replace.
We can be thankful that some items will break.
Not only are they replaced but often improved by redesign.
Whatever happens, the older we get the less likely we are
to be condescendingly scalded when things get lost,
and when we find the means to lose our pride
it is truly wonderful. It helps us look after our skills,
and keep on finding the will to live better.

The Forgetting Is The Hardest Part

Only without the sheet music
 can you play it and live it like you mean it.

Cull The Trade Not The Seals

We are now ten days
and counting into the annual baby seal cull
in Canada, where we are told
they are killed for their fur.
It is a trade which is now at best
a minor sideline for the fisherman
who do the inhumane killing.
It is more a tradition/hobby
than an economic activity.
Also fur trading companies are now rare,
and shrinking in number.
Here are some facts about where the skins go.
As a list of who makes money out of something
that is provably vain and pointless it is a start
for culling a pointless economic activity.

Unknown Unknowns

When a doctor prescribes a placebo-
naturally not telling the patient first,
it would spoil the effect-how does
either of them tell the difference between
the non-effect the doctor intended
and other real and unintended side effects?

Successful Sincerity

We will know that we have made
actual artificial life with machines
when we find integrity in how they apologise
when they know that we know that they are wrong.

Put Some Aggression Into Self Improvement,

and you can put some force behind your altruism and mutuality
and leave the world a better place than you found it. 

The Life Of The Mind, The Flight Of The Book

"There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind
that cannot be denied.
It's true that you might be socially isolated,
because you're in the library, at home, so on,
but you're intensely alive,
in fact you're much more alive than the folks
walking these streets in New York in crowds...
if you read John Ruskin or Mark Twain, [or] Herman Melville,
you almost have to throw the book against the wall
because you're so intensely alive you need to take a break!"
-Cornell West from here.

Drink Up!

Whether the cup of life
seems half empty or half full is relative,
semantics, a matter of perspective.
What is absolute is that nearer the dregs
we get the more the more it will seem
as if there is just too much of them.

Reality Escapes Me

I note with detachment that the more
constructed reality fills the yawning gaps
in television schedules in all it's cheapness
the more the emptiness in the format makes
the viewer who thinks it has some content
leave their set on with the sound turned off,
and to make up for non-script in the entertainment
they fill in with some proper activity in their own lives.
They have to do something whilst pretending to watch,
in imitation of continuous partial attention.
Only when the set is turned off,
can they see how they were being pursued
by an ever more dilute, and dissolute, inattention.

Whether Seeing Clouds,

or peering at the stars, looking outward is the best recipe for openness,
Jerry Waxman had something to say about it. 

Joseph Stalin's Bastard Offspring

I am sure that the citizens of Eastern Ukraine
who are pro Ukraine and pro civil government
would be like many other former soviet states.
Less alarmed at the prospect of their state
being corporally reincorporated into Russia
if the Russian Patriots currently leading the agenda
by overrunning police stations and parliaments
showed more affirmative signs of statehood
than pruriently believing the western world
is run by drug addicts and sodomites, whilst
admiring such opportunities for hypocrisy-
if only they could be in charge of presenting them.
But in the meanwhile the gun is the best means
of government, and for them the best thing
since bread came sliced, another task
that is beyond their organisational ability.

The Patron Saint

of guilt, theft, misplaced loyalty,
betrayal, and maybe forgiveness
sought too late to give respite,

finally gets his dues from a church
and world that because of what they are like
 does not know where to put him. 

New Definitions

-Committee (noun)-a group that sets itself up
to organise something which it always finds itself out of it's depth
with when it's members find they are out their depth with both each other
and the task they have given themselves.
They always find other tasks need completed for their idea to work.
All of which means that they always need more help than any of them
could have foreseen when they started. To justify their existence
they always give themselves small tasks they can manage unassisted,
whilst leaving the bigger tasks they were formed to complete undone.

For further reading see Parkinson's Law

Seventeen Ways To Keep Your Lover

For millennia man knew nothing about the mechanics
by which he reproduced,
particularly when responsibility might confined him.
After the last 200 years of western science
women now have fifteen ways of choosing
to not conceive whilst consenting to sex.
Each with different degrees of consequence,
and risk for their health, with their varying physiologies.
Nearly all of the risks are presently misunderstood
by a medical profession mostly built by men,
who have two means of helping women to not conceive,
withdrawal and the condom. Both of which limit their pleasures
and require degrees of self control that reduce, if not defeat,
the oft disguised point of the activity
-pleasing themselves more then their partners.

The science of contraception has mostly been developed
by men with a vested interest in knowing less
about the long term effects of the science they design for women.
No wonder men say 'After you' to the ladies
when it comes to pleasure without conception,
especially if when the prevention fails.
Carrying a child you did not intend to conceive to term,
and into life, unsupported, has so often proved very stressful.

Bondage Is Us

The Stockholm Syndrome
is nothing new.
The angels in Hell know it too,
as they follow orders
for punishing sinners
in the timeless manner.
For them
there is no redemption.

Confounding Expectations

My greatest gift is the ability
to apologise graciously
for my many incompetences
whilst retaining a measure
of esteem by which to keep on trying.
It makes what I do seem better than it is.

Bad Neighbourliness

I suspect that the real reason
Russian citizens of The Ukraine,
the descendants of Stalin's remnants,
have taken to the streets with arms,
to set about destroying the symbols
the state of the country they live in
is simply because they live too well.
The Russians who identify with Russia
rather than the country they live in
want the blessings of a shorter life,
more ridden with alcohol abuse,
increased stress and associated illnesses,
with reduced quality that is more like
life in The Oligarchy next door
which that want to see restored-
and extended worldwide.

Between 'The Nanny State',

and 'the thought police', we measure our liberty
by how we can complain about one other,
whilst changing nothing about the technology
thrust upon us that insists it is 'for our good and safety'.
Because such technology it is the means
by which we complain. All this stops us
imagining the risks we could take going off-line
that would-and still could-expand our creativity.

Who Was Jesus Ghost Writer?

Nobody knows who first wrote the The Gospels.
In the world they were written in they were dissident
self publishing and an extension of dissident self belief.
It is said they are true because copies of them littered the ancient world
more than any other documents and the copies found now
are relatively consistent with each other.
That is the history of those words.
The proof of who actually did write them no longer exists,
and when it did exist nobody was interested.

Few writers in history were credited
with what they wrote, and fewer still kept
their ownership and identity down the ages.
Even in Britain up to the mid 19th century
custom forced many authors, particularly women,
to write anonymously, or under a pseudonym,
to be read by the public at all. Only now
are the names, once invisible in the past,
irreversibly attached with their work-
and still their lives remain mysterious.

Whoever Jesus ghost writers were
and however they portrayed his centrality
to the characters around him, from a distance
of 2000 years, can we get under the skin
of what it was like to live under Roman Rule?
All talk of 'humble origins' is euphemism
for a life of fear and shame under militarism
and however well Jesus lived, anyone who feared
and wrote was not going to be known for their writings.

Do You Ever Feel You Need A Rest?

Because being always wins over doing
when doing becomes too exhausting.

A Note Of Calm

and when we/they do think and worry it is mostly short term.

The Faster The Life

and the more complex the media
the shorter the attention span will be.
The weaker the applied reason
to living, with the constant novelty.

Character

is being faithful to your mistakes
until other people have adopted them
as if they were your virtues.

A Fright Of Hormones

My mature friend and I discussed gay pride parades.
I shared with her how I was baffled by the most popular placard
that the youths carried which proclaimed in pink plastic,
 'Love is a human right'.

I was unsettled by how the words 'love', 'human' and 'right'
uneasily cohabited with so few adjoining words.
The phrase seemed to be utopian Newspeak,
obscurely written for the naive to quote
without having to explain what it means.
My friend and I agreed-we are now too old
to be comfortable with crowds and slogans.
This event is for the young and bright
'Yes' she said-'Hormones are a human fright'.

Stolen Teeth

“The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.

Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth:

`I, the State, am the People.’…

Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth.”

-Frederick Nietzsche

Nietzsche as painted by Edward Munch

The Sport Of War

with thanks to streetart.

Faith In Numbers

One of the phrases that always kills my will to listen
is 'Let me be absolutely clear about this'.
I  just know the speaker is going to quote quantities
and complain by numbers and their job
is to stifle debate via the power of statistics.

The Once And Future Government

Where Hope is never quite abandoned, but remains elusive.

The Maths Of Attentiveness

When a silence is inattentively shared
it divides and isolates the sharers.
Though a singular sense of solitude
is a strengthening life skill,
a treasure that increases in value with  maturity.
But where two or more people attend
to being still together, their stillness multiplies
to become a shared ease, positively company.

A Currency That Keeps Its Value

There is an acceptance at face value
at a moving distance that I know very well.
It happens when I stand by a local lay-by
and stick my thumb out to hitch a lift.
Whoever sees me whilst driving
has under two seconds to trust my face
sufficient to let me in their vehicle.
That is when I am an object in their mirror
-one which they did not expect to see.
When they stop it is out of trust.
I in my turn have to trust them for us both
to provide what might be the total sum
of that day's semblance of civilised spontaneity,
to briefly be a small part of one another's journey.

Serious Humour

Belief is about trying to be part of the telling of  the joke,
 rather than unwillingly having a role in the punchline.  

Daddy

did the Stations Of The Cross every week,
ten of them on his Littlewoods Pools entry.
When after many years he lost interest
he still paid for the form, but had his children
fill it in for him. At the weekend they checked the football scores too.
Whoever filled in the form, we never won any money,
but Dad was happy that he was preparing us for his idea
of an adult life. One where the displacement activities were more mature,
and they more effectively sustained the illusions of status he wanted us to hold to.
Had I paid for what I filled in and checked every week I might have
invested hope in it. He spent twice as much on the on pools
as my weekly pocket money, and I could not mind his faith
in gambling as the loss leader life du jour.
I was kept by him as a loss leader's loss leader.
But his faith in risk burnt him out when he became unemployed,
a status that I inherited far sooner than he did.
So never winning the pools was my prep for keeping
the civil servants at Social Security in work,
and myself in pocket money, by my applying for jobs
I was never going to get, but which it was my sacred duty was to apply for.

When The Medium Is The Massage

In the Democracy of the blind
the Vote is king and The Media is their minister;
there is no further need for government or messenger.
Nor if the massage is constant is further effort
required for people to vote more than how they are told to.
When the media massages the populous hard enough
they assume the role of upholders of democracy
by raising up voters of reduced opinion.
When a blind democracy fails what is the CPR that revives it?
Oligarchy? Then the message is much less what it seems to be.
But it reads 'Beware....'