When Counting Shows Us We Have More Than We Thought

Summer means 'Gay Pride Month'.
This year there will be no marches;
all celebrations of sexuality will be online
which will make them seem more confined
for those of us who see computers
as a means to the end,
not a source of life in themselves
as much as a route to ever deeper social isolation.

But this might be the right year to reflect
that whilst there there are over two hundred
national governments across a world,
in over eighty of them the expression
of same sex relations is illegal,
that is too many countries to list here,
but fifteen of them are in The Commonwealth
the greater bock once controlled by the Britsh,
among the eighty a large majority are Muslim,
and the law remains the way it does
because of the slippage between law an custom. 

Shrinking The Future

Science fictions writers
are the fortune tellers
of the technological age.

Male SF writers were weak and macho.
Like storytellers down the ages,
they recycled the old expectations
to reassure lazy audiences,
as they borrowed from macho pasts
that palled and paled with each variation.

Since 1945 the best new SF writers
were women who created a new sexual politics
to predict our changing reactions
as our dependence on new technology
undid the oldest binaries of gender roles.

Women writers explored where men shut down
the degree to which technology makes us all data
to be dissected by choices in human nature,
where we had to admit that we did not know
the character of the lead we were all following.

In this ontological race to shrink ourselves
by becoming aware of ourselves as cogs
in ever bigger machines, our only choice
of future is to choose when to stop, ourselves,
and stop all futures in favour of the present.....

Revenge

is a dish best reinforced
with a sauce of violence
to make the malcontent
clear to all who cause it.

To this extent violence 'works',
until the venting ends,
then the old urge returns once more..... 

When Did You Want To Be Frightened?

The bigger the scale of an operation
the bigger the scale for potential error,
except where the deal is 'too big to fail'
at which point the terror hits
when everything else fails first.

The Sieve Of Life

'Between what is said and not meant
and what is meant and not said
most of love is lost'-Kalhil Gibran 

Santa For President

Christmas and elections are similar.
both use hyperactivity and hype
to tire the masses with lies
.
Both use how people tire of lies
to wear people down how people resist
and make them submit to commerce
in the name of 'family values'.

The best families exist
outside of all this noise
and overdone clutter.

The best individuals
exist well outside
of family values. 

A Narrowing Sense Of Humour?

In the verbally chaste society
I was co-opted into
I enjoyed all the double entendes I heard,
they fed my weak sense of rebellion
which needed nurture if it was to live.

Now the older I get the more singular
the entendes have become
and as single entendes
they were mostly invitations
to some humourless sexual power-play
where the other player
has lied to themselves first
to make the lie more believable
when they shared them with me, later.

I am getting too old
to be cheaply misled
by shallow side shows. 

The Leash Of Life

As must all good owners/carers of dogs
when they want to live better and longer....

Language Inflation

In 1960 art critics began to write
in surreal superlatives, never used before
about how they were transported by what they saw.

When the art did not transport them
to the heights that the language went
they still wrote on as if it did,
because they now loved writing.

Many a female artist lost their living
as male critics praised male artists
and put a certain masculist spin
on the workings of the art world.

This spin took off on it's own
when applied to the politics
of mass youth unemployment
when the old line was reapplied
by the moneyed middle aged
'Youth is wasted on the young'
as we were laid waste to.... 

My Discomfort Zone

has recently extended,
like everyone else's has.
Covid-19 has seen to that.
But who minds going less far
when nobody else is, either?

We now we live in a world
where distance from others
means health and the safety
and where the telephone
is the height of intimacy.
The telephone and laptop
are the space where we safest
and where we can cheaply say
what we like in each other.

However much government
seeks to lift the lock down
there will be a new virus
waiting to find us,
just around the next bend.



   

Do You Suffer From Analysis Paralysis?

You are not alone, many people do,
when they are offered too many facts
to make sense of in any one go.

Beyond acknowledgement,
and easing back on on the media
that we unwillingly accept,
it is hard to know what to do about it.

Be Careful What You Seek

Is your flexibility sincere?

In these days of commerce
once being a byword for reliability,
with service that was once instant,
nobody can be sure of anything.

With goods and travel becoming unreliable
far fewer people now know
where to go to get their needs met,
and whether their wants
is still worth the asking.

Three Stages Of Dis/Enfranchisement

Up to the twentieth century in wealthy west
the public were the subjects of the iron whim
of absolutist monarchies in a dying Feudalism.

The descendants of Adam Smith
refashioned all those old divisions
to create Capitalism Ancient and Modern.

In the early Twentieth Century
women fought, went to prison,
and endured forced feeding
for their right to vote
before The Great War
ended their campaign.

The first women to get the vote
got it for being the chattels
of their home-owning husbands.

When all women, and everyone 21 and over
was enfranchised we were slow to realise;
as chattels we now paid taxes.
What we gained was the right to choose
who we were to be the chattels of.

Great Turn-Offs Of Our Time (18)

The phrase 'begs the question'
has bugged me for years
maybe those who use it
mean 'sets the question',
or more likely 'invites the question'.

But who is begging for what, of whom, here?

The Certainty Of Optimism

is nearly always galvanised
by highly convincing misinformation
transmitted via media that are
far more opaque than we like to think.

Nine Symptoms Familiar To Us All

And on the bingo card that is mental ill health
calling 'house' when you have a line of three or more symptoms
is part of 'normal' every day life, no point in pondering it.
 Calling 'full house' because you recognise all of them
 as part of yourself does not win you a strait jacket
 in the design of your choice. It means you should 
find a sympathetic mental health charity who will listen 
 to you to help you work out a long term plan 
to cope with  the symptoms.

Dysfunctionally Yours

Some believe in excelling in this life,
doing their 10,000 hours with their gift
when young, so that when they are adults
their talent will bring them wealth
enough to keep them through adulthood.

This usually means a life of excess
through insecurities where they don't know
who or what to turn to for the most apt support.

In my life I have excelled at nothing
beyond surviving the repeated failure
to adapt, and achieve enough, materially
to make a front that makes me 'normal'.
Retirement is the nearest activity
that I found that matches normality.

Out of my slow and wonderful failure
I have refined a character that nobody else wants
and nobody is jealous enough to seek to own,
which will go unmourned when it is gone.

Long may it be so.

Virtue Signalling

Is nearly always more signalling than virtue.
In these Covid times the exception to this rule
is when we say less and wear our masks in public.

Bags For Eternity

Where there is money there are shoppers.
and shoppers need to be told what to think.

These messages have to be repeated
until their hearers no longer remember
where they heard the messages first.

With whatever organ they recorded,
remembered and obeyed the message
to buy more, that is where their soul is,
their 'bag for all eternity'...... 

A temporary, but ever renewing bag
for their life of eternal consumption.

Dialogues For The Deaf (2)

When truths becomes lies
the process can't be reversed.

The next change has to be that the lies
have to change form, expression.
They have to grow
until they are changed
beyond all recognition,
to be beyond disputation.

When they have reached their final form
nobody cares any more
what they or anyone else says.

We have all stopped listening
for finding nothing worth listening to.

What To Do When Waiting In A Queue On The Phone

From before the times of telephones
queues have always been 'popular'
with the authorities who believed
that the  public should be made
to wait to make them more grateful
when they were eventually served.

If the public did not say 'Thank you'
then the powers that be extracted
all the gratitude they wanted,
through how slowly they bled
all sense of urgency out of the public
with how they were made to wait
as if the public were at the back and call
of the all-powerful officials.

But now we have a new phenomenon;
the queue to be personally answered on the telephone.

My recipe for refreshing yourself
whilst listening to the interval music
and being told about the website ad nauseam
is at the start have with you a pen and paper
and for each cycle of music and a repeated message
on a piece of paper put a 1 until you four in a row.
On the fifth message/piece of music put a / across the four I's.

Now you have a barn gate, which stands in for the figure 5.
Repeat until the people at the other end answer the phone
and attend to your needs, are at least attempt to be courteous.

Note how long they take to respond personally to your call.

Divide the length of your wait to the nearest minute
by the number of barn gates you have created
and that will tell the length of their message and music,
and you will have kept yourself attentive to the the end.   

The Future We Must Mistrust Has Already Arrived

Phillip K. Dick was a difficult man,
he wrote dytopian science fiction
like nobody would believe,
he was prolific and he died young.

Disguised mistrust,
and ground that shifted
underneath people's feet,
were the major themes of his work.

Never was this more apparent
than with how little money he made
in his lifetime from his own work.
But all too after his death
many of those stories,
became the sources for films
which went on to dominate the culture.

The moral of this blog
is that his tales of mistrust
through advanced technology
mistrusted their author
before becoming popular. 

The New Hygienic History

In the recent riots across the 'developed' world
dumb statues were challenged at their plinths
because the figures on top of them
developed racist human rights
that benefited wealthy whites
over everything else in sight,
particularly the right to whitewash history.

There the protesters did not social distance,
but did cover their faces like many have done before
the less to be identified.
With all the rinse at their disposal
they washed their hands and minds
of other people's Historic Racism.

Not that it can't be reinvented.....
  

Now Wash Your.......

Every time I see a hand sanitiser
at the entrance of a shop
I use it-why would I not?

Often a member of staff
stands the right social distance
from the hand sanitising dispenser,
lightly commending customers to use it.

Each time I see them I have the urge to ask
 'Do you have a mind sanitiser that works just as well too?'.

Such cheap sarcasm expresses my quiet dislike
of how the act of buying food has become a duty
much more than the choice, the pleasure,
and the 'freedom' it once was, B.C. (before Covid).   

Beware Of Labels

I know that humans come in many colours.
I am not at all sure all humans are organic.
I worry about the more obviously synthetic ones....  

Another Country

Nostalgia is the Stockholm Syndrome
for the elderly and infirm
that locks them into the past
and out of the present.

There fading memories combine
with faint hopes in the present
which together lead
to the place of no return.    

Cruelty Without Beauty

Education is what educates people,
for both good and for ill.

Statues may presume to teach
but they are the dumb insolence,
of the hyper-wealthy victors
making figureheads for history
out of their antecedents
to make lies of history
where who gained the most
did so by telling the biggest lies.

In this narrative 99.99 % of people were ignored
and their lives cruelly shortened
for the beauty of those who knew the cruelty
with which their wealth was achieved.

When the statues to slave owners are so quiet,
the silence helps hides their shame better.
,

Misanthropy Inc

Good manners make good neighbours.

The further from each other
we are when we perform them,
the more sustainable
our good manners appear to become.

In The Film Of My Life

I don't want my name above the title,
I would rather that the film were not made
and script left to gather dust.

But I'd be happy to be an unnamed extra,
among too many to name in the final credits
and let those who have achieved the most
out of what was falsely ascribed to me,
take the bigger central roles they always craved.  

Vocation

means leaving alone that which know will do you harm
however much other people think that the deed
they want you do is going to make their fortune.

Picture Set Of The Month - July

A depiction of the Julian Calendar,
for more information about it read here. 

A depiction of  the Roman Calendar
for more information read here. 

The Chinese Calendar, for more information read here.

The Baha'i calendar for more information read here.