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...