Death-The T-Shirt

There are far more enlivening uses for 700 gallons of water than merely making one T shirt....

Drugs For Everyone?

As a youth I shared the callow idea,
recycled from from who-knows-where,
about putting hallucinogenic drugs
into the national water supply,
'to set us all free from responcibility'.

At the time I neither paid water rates
nor took drugs. I horrified my elders,
who without reason I felt better than.

Imagine my surprise upon reading
over thirty years later that in 1930s Germany
The National Socialists actually did
what I had once briefly joked about.

Who knew that for most of his adult life
Adolf Hitler secretly took more drugs,
and drugs more toxic to his health,
than my long time hero Jerry Garcia
could ever have dreamt of taking?

Telling Stories

is an ingrained habit for humans,
who like to detain each other
at length with expansive narratives.

Technology has vastly expanded
the means by which we do this.

The problem is that as our stories
get retold they travel far less well
than the teller likes to think;
the less personal the means
of the telling the further the story gets;
the more constantly the script
needs to be refreshed to keep travelling .

But in our deathly self absorption
we continue to insist we are 'entertaining'.

God save you all from my boredom with myself.

Monologues For The Inattentive

Charismatic people often become public speakers,
little realising that one of the effects of their charisma
is that whilst it draws large audiences towards them,
it gets in the way of their words being listened to, closely.

The draw of the charisma destroys the possibility
of the content their speech of being remembered,
and reduces what they have said to a few sound-bites .

Distant Sensuality

Recently I walked down the street
in the small town near where I live.

Two youths in school uniforms passed me.
I overheard one say, to his friend...

'I would love to nestle my head in that beard...  '.

We rarely know how we are seen in public. 

Natural Intelligence

The media is full of comment
on the intelligence and playfulness,
not to mention sensitivity, of animals.
To the point where when folks listen
and recall what they heard before
they would surely see animal intelligence
as a given - nearly as much they assume
that with the ways media repeats stories
about discovering  animal intelligence
that human beings are highly inattentive.     

Abandon All Hope

Ye who enter the world this way. The way is fine, the desination is not worth it...

Reversing Into The Future

Wanting to be both popular and right
has always the height of hypocrisy-
the words of world leaders prove this.

That is why I accept belief in God;
his inconsistencies are everyone's
-writ large enough to be recognisable
but too large to be commonly understood;

Omniscience, Omnipresence and Omnipotence
have always been impossible to balance with each other
and even harder to sustain with goodwill in faith.

I live for insight;
let my errors be curable for being visible,
and let me know, beyond seeing,
that there is a life in the world to come.

Today

We make the currency of life money and time.
But before the invention of debt it was just time
which was then best measured by the seasons.

The good samaritan had to be in no hurry
to see the injured man at the edge of the road.
Time was what allowed him to see the man,
and then told him 'be free with your money,
you have enough to right a wrong and live well'.

Every season is a season of good will.
 

The (not so) Secret News

If newscasters said this they need only say it once. But they would soon be unemployed...

Wither Altruism?

Employers have for a long time used the logic
of 'survival of the fittest' with each other
to create a market for long term instability
in employment, the easier to make rejection
seem 'natural' for 'the unfit' who can't help being what they are.

Such competition increase the stress on those in work,
and reduces the overall fitness of the population.
So when we hear of 'Opportunities for advancement',
then we should ask ourselves 'Advancement for whom?
The person applying? The person being applied to?
Or the alternative employer who is his opposition?'.

Appetite Vs Insight

Young men who live in cities
live as if they own the place,
little realising the place own them.
They are little boys in big bodies,
bodies enlarged by appetite.

When their money is matched
by their testosterone and adrenalin
then they will have the sex drive
of their choice, and then have
the thirst for owning property.
Each allowing them autonomy.

But they will realise all too late
how their eye for the gentler detail of life
shrank without them realising it.

The Easier Way To Get Your Words Wrong

Because our minds often retreat when they do find the right words.

The Blue Plaque Society (Revised)

Were I ever to be publicly celebrated,
say, for my services to blogging,
then much of my life would remain
unexplained, for being  far too boring.

As death approaches to take me
I would refuse to have a grave stone;
instead I would insist on a blue plaque
which bears the following inscription
'Here is where Malcolm stopped living.'.
and the date eternal rest added after.

Let the rest be mis-remembered.....

Size Matters

When folks in Northern ireland
greet a singular adult male
they say 'Hello big man'.

When it is said to me
I am always surprised.
'Me? Big?' is my first thought.

To myself I am always a child
and the part of me I'd like to be
of greatest significance and size
is my open-ness and curiosity.

Putting The Gr Into Attitude

The busier people are
the more passive they get
to what they are consumed by;
the more self absorbed they become.

Any quiet onlooker would ask
'Who is consuming who here?'.

But the consumed are too busy
being consumed by being consumers
to be intact enough to concider the question.....

The Less We Know

the less we know what to fear,
but we still need to know
what it takes to be sincere.

Crime Scene

No trees have come forward to prove witness to this singular death, they were too far away and rooted to the spot.

Detachment

is quiet and very very catching,
sufficiently so that when it does catch us
we are often unaware of how it has caught us... ....unawares.

Mother Never Said

to, or of, the young Malcolm
'He can't even change a light bulb
without me having to do it for him,
never mind his hopes as a child
that how we live when he is older
will be better than it is now'.

Though she knew that children
the world over expect optimism
to be the hallmark of their futures.

She never needed to speak
-her actions spoke for her.
What came across loud and clear
was her need to never be questioned.

I can't mind. I have survived being her property.
But may I dedicate this blog entry to her?

She will assume she wrote in the first place....

False Self Esteem

I know what smart people look like,
and how expensively they dress.
The more I know about them
the less I am one of them.

Beautiful Symmetry

The Peacock Room Castello di Sammezzano

 in Reggello, Tuscany, Italy.

Cencorship is When....

not knowing before means never finding out after....

Lost For Words

For many gay men, and many heterosexuals too,
sex is 'their deepest means' of communication, in lieu,
of course, of something better settled, that is lighter,
meets need more than want, and is better spoken.

'Just Like That.... '

Every day the british media brings fresh rumours
of what 'Brexit' might or might not mean.
Not knowing is the nearest we have to certainty. 
As the British have this national conversation,
well shouting match, via their media, 
I am driven to thinking that the whole thing 
is like a trick by the late comedian Tommy Cooper.

His tricks always failed, and the humour
was in how he apologised for the failings.
and 'Just like that' he died, live on television.

Is this to be our future?

Refining Progress Through Misanthropy

Charles Darwin neither invented nor discovered
how animals compete with one another to survive,
On his voyage on The beagle to the south seas
he began his studies by reinterpreting Lamarkism.
The more he looked and thought, and took samples
the more, through the ideas of Thomas Malthus,
his understanding found something wholely new.
 
Alas he could not have foreseen how his science
would lead to whole new arguments to justify
the inequality and misanthropy between humans,
when the rich trod on the poor to maintian their wealth,
as if all such steps were 'natural'. And in the next century
false victimhood would falsify his science for it's triumph.

If science rewrote history the way Christians once did,
according to their beliefs, the year of Darwin's birth, 1809,
would be the new year zero. B.D. would be Before Darwin,
A.D. would become After Darwin, and the good news
would be about how well science proves
that the wealth of the powerful is their right,
particularly when it justifies the poor being poorer.

Capital and Capitalism are just like nature;
the competitive advantage in both is to be defended
at all costs. Beneath the fur both are red in tooth and claw.
Everyone and everything is beyond all redemption.

The Dishonest Dress Sense

And women in business suits can be just as bad......

Against Nietzsche

Ask anyone with PTSD,
and the many other conditions,
which are not illnesses,
that damage the individual
beyond their means to resist
through sheer pressure.

After being presses
they require long term help
if they are to survive; they will say

'What does not kill you does not make you stronger.'.

But with the right support
survivors of these conditions
sometimes feel glad to be alive.