Drink,

when often taken to excess,
will convert everyday charm
into a wheedling oversensitivity.

You Too Can Find Your Inner 14 Year Old

And since the 1990s games have 'matured' to be even more addictive and time consuming. Now they are almost lifestyles in themselves....

Post-Modern Consumerism

How did we get from what was once
a solid cash economy to an imitation of life
where objects seem to float even as we are sold them,
only to lose most of their value the instant we own them?
How did we get to a place where the whole point of selling
is to create debt; that is the most profitable way of making money?  

An Old Joke Taken Seriously

When George Bernard Shaw wrote
'Those that can do, those that can't teach'
that was his idea of a dry joke, which proves
how some jokes age badly and still get retold.

But he was also reinforcing through the hope of art
that well known hierarchy where the rich and self educated
define everyone else, particularly the poor - whom they divide
between the worthy/semi skilled (the teachers) and the unworthy
(their pupils who for lack of space/materials will never be skllled)
all the better make pupil and teacher co-dependent on each other
and make each blind to how thoroughly they are divided from above.

All of this helps keep the riches of the wealthy well hidden
-except for when displays of old bling confirm old defferences.

Self Ceiling?

Ghettos are self limiting spaces
which reinforce themselves
by denying their occupants
the ability to imagine life outside.

Progress

Because the tempation towards dishonesty never leaves us
progress will always be measured by when we stop lying
and expand the breadth of the subjects we try to be honest about.
For trying we will often find ourselves falling short of achieving our intent.

Note To Self (4)

8, 9, and 10 are what I need to repeat most....

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

The English still underplay how the limits
they once endured through rationing
during - and long after - WW2 continue.
That was when, among many other moves
The Coalition Government of the day
reduced the recipes of commercial bakers
used to make bread with to just four choices.

A second rule was that all bread was sold
the day after it was made-were it sold sooner
it would taste too good and be eaten too soon
and in those days food really had to last.

The bread controls were like the popular press
had been for longer than folks could think beyond.
The recipe numbers were the same the owners
of the popular press. The flavours the news came in
were as formulaic as their owners could make them.

Even today the headlines are as fresh
as if it were minted several days before
-or from several decades ago.

Freedom Is Just A Throw Away....

As long as we undo the shackle our ankle first.... 

On The Value Of Listening

Many a day I get cold calls from Indian call centres;
I know they are call centres when I hear other calls
being responded to as part of the background noise
-this is far more irritating than they care to think.

The voices I respond to have a strong Indian accent.
Presently my way of dealing with these callers
is to be colder than them; I listen but refuse to speak.

Every call starts with the  phrase 'Are you... ?'
and they say my name whilst saying nothing
about how they got my details, but I know
their question is legally required for them to repeat
with what they are paid to parrot every day.

When I neither confirm nor deny my name
they soon put the phone down. I feel calmer
for resisting the bait and making them end the call.
I'd feel the heat if I put the phone down on them.

A second effect is that in my silence I closely listen
and I hear so much more clearly the condescencion
in their voice which would have driven the sales pitch
had I given my name and encouraged them continue.

Happy Birthday Mr Hitler

And would you like some fresh tea with your birthday cake? From here.

A Dome Of Concsiousness Writes....

But no amount of mere hope has dismantled how reward through technology has always both separated and united it's users against each other....

Comfort In Dystopia

In the first world there is now no escape
from either the cleansing potential of new technology
as it rewires our sense of the past, or from the sand blast
of the power sales pitch that rewrites the future, wholesale.

Politically Correct Diversity

When old double standards are renamed,
they don't go away - they also get reinvented;
that is when they multiply and breed afresh.

Must we always name this update 'diversity'?

Contrarianism In Art

Many well to do folk now quote the phrase
'Those who can do, those who can't teach',
about creativity of others ignorant that their quote
originates from a playful George Bernard Shaw.

When he said it he was being contrary at the expense
of people who were as creative, but poorer than himself.
He was poking fun at how easily wealth inspired vain
and contrarian thoughts about the lack of space
and reduced choice through which the poor lived well.

Should we be surprised at how easily irony
loses its bite when wealth inspires condescension?

Beyond Disbelief

If you find such cynicism 'bracing', then find more of it here....

In Vino Veritas

When I was young enough to want to drink
I could not afford it I, so stayed in at home.
But every night Father spent hours at the pub.
When he returned he always full of conflict.

What I see now, but could not see then,
is how the nearer he got to his house
the flatter his pleasure in the drink became,
which explains the regularity of his belligerence;
He still wanted to be back with his mates
dragging out the dregs of the evening.

I was an adult when I began to enjoy drink
and I only drank at home; my sole motive
was to increase the pleasure of my evening meal.
My motto was 'never get drunk far from your bed'.
As a truism it works rather well; the shorter the distance
the better I know it and the more I valued the journey.

Home and bed bred self respect through familiarity.

The motto also works for when drink is consumed
in quantity, for its own sake. It accounts better
for the changes the mood of the drinking consumer;
The shorter the journey toward rest, as the effects of the drink
wear off, the easier the mood changed become to own.

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

Comfort Ye My Beasts

The measure of civility of a given society
used to be how well it treated its prisoners
and how it limited the gap between rich and poor.

But I would like to amend that measure
to how well a country treats the animals,
it rears for food production, voluntarily.
Such creatures can have no understanding
of 'the nation state', or the law or custom
that they are subject to. For this
they are concidered 'beyond dumb',
for being raised purely for consumption.

The false superiority with which
we deal with the flesh that we eat
mirrors the hidden hierarchies
which heap upon each other.

The Best Rejection

is pre-prepared, and a self made choice
in which one individual agrees with another,
mutually, to desist from further contact.

Alas, most rejection is the result
of the individual being pitched
into an undeclared competition
unawares they are being entered.

As they struggle to define The Club
that they don't want to be part of,
then the individual has to define themselves
even faster, and more thoroughly,
as something other than than The Club
wants to see them as, against their free will.

The Nobel Prize

for Hypocricy could not be awarded this year;
there were too many candidates,
consequently there was too little time
to quantify the negative effects their words
compared with what their deeds underachieved
for everyone except themselves and their familiars.

The Offshore Heart

'Where ever your treasure is, your heart will be also'.
Put your treasure abroad - whether for profit,
or to improve the discretion and choice
with which the money can do to grow by itself
and however much you might protest
that 'I put my heart into where I live,
into what I do and the family I do it for'
but at best your heart will be hardened
through division. At worst it will be beached,
shrunken and left for dead on some foriegn shore.  

Too Little Delivered Too Late Is How We Now Do Charity

Multi-national charities are now like the corporations
and third world governments whose actions
they say they exist to ameliorate-when in doubt

1-they wait for crises to grow to critical levels
and blame lack of access to the media
for not giving better warnings earlier.

2-they make big public appeals
to do something basic
to beat the imminent disaster
which is abroad-behind boundaries they don't control.
They know that even as they ask the public for support
they can't deliver what they say they want to.

3-They stock pile the help at home
far from those abroad who need it most,
delivering the the safe minimum,
and making sure the TV cameras film the delivery.
But they don't deliver help where the danger is at it's worst,
even though that is where the need is at it's greatest.

4-they use the excuse of what still needs
to be delivered to make sure that the brand
of the charity remains buoyant with the folks at home
before delivering further donations abroad.

Charities are supposed to be there to fight cleptocracies,
not steal their methods and collaborate with them.

Some Things Feed Themselves

Not that they will tell you that without prompting.....

Disability vs Awareness

The deaf
are less obvious
than the blind,
and the dumb
are less obvious
than the deaf.

But this is no rule of thumb.   

Democratic Contrariness

In a world driven by the manufacture of guns
any government worthy of trust
would know better than enshrine conscription.
The only place that that leads is to greater opposition. 

Essentials In Schooling In Disenfranchisement

Because a focused adult will always be a dangerous adult. 

Political Post Modernism

It seems that in the modern world
there are no democracies, no places
where citizens decide with each other
how they should rule, and be ruled, together.

But we do have a wealth of oligarchies,
each one of which insists
that it needs our vote to sustain it.

'My' Job?

I was raised to blur the difference
between an apt humility and accepting
condescension. I am often unsure
about the values of the system I follow.
But something remains clear throughout
-all talk of 'my job' or of jobs being the property
of any nationality, region, country, or ethnicity seems silly.

Some self employed can talk about 'my job'
-they set out their contract with themselves
to do what they do, for the money they do it for
-often as part of a well networked service industry.

Also all the jobs done by workers
within a co-equal co-operative structure
are the property of those that do them. 

But otherwise jobs, and even more 'careers',
are the intellectual property of employers
who contract out remunerative roles
to would-be employees where the role
is the tasks set out within a physical space
-all of which the employer owns outright.

The contract is always more on the employers terms
than those of any employee, though some employers
may grease the wheels of industry by making it
that some employees find esteem in how they work.

Equally many more employers disown their role
of being employer through employment agencies
and encourage 'the employee' to self shrinking
pride and hubris in their ownership of the job,
thus allowing employers, generally,
a greater reward for their detachment.

Onwards And Upwards

When life seems pointless
encourage yourself by repeating
what Sisyphus repeated to himself
whilst on his toils; 'Onwards and Upwards....' 

Imbalance

All the gratitude in the world,
as shown by all forms of life
that have ever occupied the earth, combined,
would never be enough
to outweigh all the humbug of humankind.

Consistency

Anyone can be a fool on April Fools Day.
But it takes special talent to with-stand
being fool for others life long, and all year round.