Proof Of Life; When Beauty and Quotability Are Combined

Note To Self (3)

Because Self Knowledge leads to knowledge well  beyond the self, too...

I Am Feeling Low Today

And it does not matter how the weather improves....

The Zombie Life

I often feel that language has died
but due to humans using it as cover,
to help them avoid their animal nature,
it is unnaturally forced to keep moving. 

Disguise Is The Best Policy

The rich are far more opportunist
than the poor could ever be,
but the rich will always see
their opportunism as entitlement.

You Can Never Know Yourself Too Well

When I was young enough to drink but could not afford it
I had to stay in evenings in my parents house. But every night
Father spent several hours at the pub and walked home
and always arrived full of conflict. What I see now,
but misunderstood then, is how the nearer he got to the house
the more his sense of pleasure in the drink went flat,
which now explains the regularity of nightly belligerence.
He still wanted to be with his mates enjoying the dregs of the evening.

When I began to drink I was an adult and I drank at home,
and mostly to increase the sense of pleasure with food.
I adopted the motto 'never get drunk too far from your bed'.
As a truism it worked; the shorter the distance the better I knew it.
And what else was home for if not breeding respect through familiarity?

I now realize another advantage of my motto
-moods change when drink is served in any quantity.
If you travel less when the effects the drink wear off
it is much easier to adapt with, and own, that changing mood.

The self knowledge my father never had is now mine to own. 

Machine Gun Ettiquette

'We may find in the long run
that tinned food is a deadlier weapon
than the machine gun'-George Orwell.

Quoted from 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937).
What he meant was.....

1-The Great War (1914-18) would be have been impossible
without tinned processed food being sent to the troops
at the front by every participating government.

2-The mechanization that makes armaments easier to produce,
and wars easier to fight, when applied to food production,
will reduce the varieties of fruit and veg that are grown
to those with least flavour which also keep/travel best,
the easier to go to war on the once sensitive human palate.

3-When 'marketed well', food processed with chemicals
and false flavourings will prove themselves to be more popular
and more poisonous than fresh fruit and veg in the longer term. 

Thought For Good Friday

With Love, in all it's forms,
betrayal and loyalty are much alike
and we can only tell them apart
when it is too late to change
our means of survival.

Temporary Affections

A kiss will remain a kiss,
a sigh might remain a sigh,
but being groped will diminish in value.

Now That Is What I Call A Garden Shed....

From here, it is designed so everything on it is edible...

Watch Without Mother

I have seen many films at the movies,
enough that I would be happy
if I were never to see another.
The experience has been educational.
I remember so much of the detail;
the titles, the editing and the content,
including the sex and violence,
without feelings of uncleanliness.

What I am less forgiving toward
is how deliberately unmemorable 
most of the television that at the time
I felt I was forced to watch has sadly proved to be.
But back then I rarely considered
how television was a way of creating audiences
for selling product the same way
that parents used it as a child minder;
both used it to pacify and provoke others,
and pass on values which would diminish others,
whilst avoiding being seen to do so. This made them,
and all that they passed on, oh so forgettable.

Better Living Through Detachment

If I had to choose between a personal indifference towards me
from, say, a blood relative, and an impersonal indifference
from a somebody I never knew I'd always choose the latter.
Who among us would mind a life where nothing matters? 

And besides that, I am all for mutuality being more consistent. 

Putting The Humour Into Belief

'God is a comedian playing to an audience 

that is does not know how to laugh.'

—

Voltaire

Unnoticed Unknowns

The biggest poverty
in the human world
is the loss of silence.

I Like People Who Are Right

without it feeling forced,
particularly when I am unsure
how right or wrong I might be,
but I loathe the lust for certainty.

Every Problem Needs A Home

The folks who have most right to say
'Not In My Back Yard', as a way
of avoiding not taking responsibility
for the latest of many moral deficits
are the homeless.
Their debt to the world is the lightest.

But they are the people least likely to say that;
they don't have back yards to keep anything out of,
or in, and are invisible to the well clothed and homed.

Shoot The Message

In the U.S. Primary Elections
there is only one winner;
the advertising industry,
through which candidates
and voters alike practice
making targets of each other
in preparation for the real vote.

The Amnesia Theory Of History

If humans chose what to remember
based on geologic time
-the scale on which the earth remembers itself,
which practically infinity compared with our brief life span-
then we would remember much less.
And we might, unlike some of the infinities
we have invented, be forgiven before we are forgotten.

Better By Letter?

When I was young rejection was disguised
as acceptance and I was naturally confused,
and as it all panned out I was always more reduced
by both than I expected to be.
That was engineered naivety.

But when hopes that failed in person,
for my obvious lack of wealth and choice,
I still believed in writing; the personal letter.
I prized the written words that I received
which I would reread-repeatedly.

The older I got the more I typed
rather than hand-wrote the letters I sent.
What was lost in character and frankness
was improved in the edit and ease of reading.
And still...  ...they had to be posted
and waited for that once a day.

Then emails shifted me further along
and conditioned me to be less precious,
since people only half read what I wrote
and then probably deleted it, undigested.

Meeting people remained relatively easy,
but the longer I go on the harder it gets
to make new friends out of those I meet.

Finding reliable internet correspondents
is like looking for a thread in a haystack.
I still hope to be found. Is this randomized
isolation a fit motivation for self publishing?  

Dear Mr Winston Smith

  It is brave and necessary for you and me and many millions of others to try to use on the people in power the same language of persuasion in online petitions as they use on us in elections. Alas, the language of persuasion acts like a two way mirror for the powers that be, but one way mirror for most of the public. Through language the people in power know far more about the people they have power over than the people who are ruled over, and falsely called citizens, know about their rulers. When the masses speak what they say becomes ground up digits of information that the government ministries, which strive to appear to be friendly, use to gain maximum information from in order to later prove their hostility, through their actions.

  The government department run by a Mr Iain Duncan Smith, our esteemed minister for long term unemployment is more transparently Orwellian than most. Should we thank Mr Smith for the open contradictions and covert hostility of his policies towards those who have the least? Not really....

1-he would not want the thanks, being sufficient in how he thanks himself, in the bespoke tailoring he displays as 'power dressing' when he addresses the media on terns where they have to be fawning towards him.

 2-it would be like thanking The Devil for his intelligence-it is not wise to thank people for their gifts when such gifts are honed to be used against us. It is wiser to know they have the gifts that empower their hostility and not thank them unless you can make it clear their hostility is both recognized and unwanted.

  Given the innate hostility of the powers that be towards the masses, which is now called 'the new brutalism' and their shyness about admitting to it, what we do in lieu of sincere thanks in communications is an awkward matter.

  Any open sarcasm would spotted as such straight away and openly held against us, the offended minister would spin themselves as 'being the victim of a backlash' and proceed with their own agenda. The least we can do is try to appeal to the kinder nature of governments whilst being hostile towards the powers that be underneath the surface in the language we use. And we must do this double think for our own advantage whilst having a more genuine support for each other than the state/government provides for us.

  Whilst there is life outside of the state it should be lived. Malcolm.

Deception Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

I often wonder before I react 'Who should loathe most?'
and 'Which folk should I just not get worked up about?'
without ever getting near creating a pecking order.

I can live quite well with the second-long transactions
I have had on the streets of Belfast with strangers.
They hand me gospel tracts in the hope that I'll Believe,
and ask no more than I wordlessly accept their offer.

In the age of the zero attention span
that the internet has ushered in
their faith in the power of the written word
to change a persons life from within
is actually more touching than they think.

I have no time for my local press, though.
Local life in small towns is small enough
without them falsely inflating its importance,
only for it to shrink even more on reading about it.

Who, and what, ever I should loathe the most,
I know deception is the eye of the beholder. 

Note To Self (2)

Because reflection is not expected of the majority.

Lost In Data

Hoarding used to be a simple thing;
Most things that were made lost their value,
through use, becoming unfit to pass on
as something honest, once and still useful,
as well as once being personal to someone.

The longer we kept things,
the fuller our homes got and the less
what we kept was of any worth.
The balance only tipped the other way
when the space became worth more
than what was occupying it.
But even that barely persuades us
to divest, and disinvest in old decisions.

Now we have laptops with vast levels of storage
in which we collect vast amounts of data
-far more than any brain could remember
and much too many man hours of processing.
We think this is life, and it is an improvement
on the past. But really we are only lost in data.

An Intelligent Bit Of Recycling

Shoot The Messenger

History is the height of honesty
but it is a knowledge full of gaps 
and is firmly distrusted by many.
Ask anyone who blames religions
for all the war in the world.
They will tell you 'History is full of lies'.

What if a secular method of history
were devised - one which explained
the past in much richer detail
than the present explanations
of what we humans used to do,
and without bile or scapegoating?

Would they blame secularism too?

Better Reasoning For Discontent

Not that greatness is achievable by everyone.

The No-Strings Society

The self made and wealthy always say
that giving the unemployed a hand up
only makes them even more like the puppets
of government than nobody should never be
whilst stringing along the powers that are
with legal binding plans for tax avoidance. 

The Stockholm Syndrome Explained

From here.

Kinky Money

I usually like thrift and efficiency,
but when we tighten each other belts
too much it becomes an exercise
in mutual bondage-to poverty.

Weaponising Maths

In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule,
the only education was religious.
But in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan
little boys learned their maths by the following method...

“A group of Mujahideen are on the front line.
Three of them are on duty at the checkpoint.
Each has a box that consists of sixty bullets.
In the fight against the infidels.
The first Mujahid fired 24 bullets,
the second 40, and the third 16.
Write the total number of bullets fired
and the numbers that are remaining.”

Sometimes there were extra questions
which if answered correctly would earn the boys
extra esteem from the teacher such as.....

“If a total of 19 infidels were killed with a single shot
by the brave Mujahideen, how many bullets missed?”

So far the ISIS approach to teaching maths
to young boys has yet to be revealed to the world. 

How Does Three Divide Into Seven?

Paticularly when everyone focuses on the centre which never holds for long?

Why Are Sex And Food Opposites?

With food the starter is the lightest dish,
a taste of what is to come, to be going on with.
A dish with which to put guests at ease,
the better to encourage conversation.

But in sex the foreplay is the greater part,
the extended repast that warms the partners.
Foreplay is what prepares them both
for the main course where many a man,
overhwelmed by desire, makes short shrift
of his lot, much to frustration of their partner.

The best folk enrich the event with music.
Combining the two appetites make the event longer. 

Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair

I first read the dystopian classic '1984'
when I was an uneducated teenager.
I have forgotten much of the book,
beyond how the prose style suggested
a life that was dusty, tired, and over-processed.

One scene that was not in the book
was the live broadcast of an execution,
the type of thing which inspires mass numbness
and a fearful and painful public indifference.
But inspired by the book such an event
became a powerful fantasy for me,
a fixation a could neither rid myself of
nor share which was part of me for years.

Now I know my fantasy actually happened
and not only was the execution broadcast live
on local radio 'because it is a news story',
but the method of the execution travelled
and was much used. Please listen about it here.