Monthly Archives: January 2018

O while I live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
No fumes, no ennui, no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground, proving
my interior soul impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with
perfect nonchalance!

~ Walt Whitman

The Wisdom.

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

~ Charles Bukowski, Factotum

He Said, She Said.

She: But you keep a sword in your bedroom.
Me: You say that like it’s a weird thing.
She: It is a weird thing!
Me: What’s weird about it? Where do you keep your sword?
She: …. [drinks deeply of Jameson’s Irish Whisky]
Me: The cleaver in the kitchen doesn’t seem to bother you much.
She: We’re not talking about your kitchen.
Me: Perhaps we should. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable there.
She: Maybe. Less swords.
Me: Fewer.
She: What?
Me: Fewer swords. There are fewer swords in my kitchen than in my bedroom, but vastly more cleavers.
She: There will be fewer women in your bedroom, but more proper grammar.
Me: It’s actually more of a usage issue than a grammatical one. If we’re being technical.
She: Has anyone ever just lit you on fire? Just like here, now, in front of a herd of witnesses, just doused you with Jamie’s and set light to you?
Me: Nobody’s ever cared enough. Until now.

N.P.: “Mladek” – Russian Circles

“He sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can’t be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about.”

~ Aldous Huxley

Interesting.

dinowang

“May you live in interesting times” is perhaps the most ancient of Chinese curses.  I think the times we live in can certainly be described as “interesting” in the Chinese sense, though I think this for likely very different reasons than you might suspect.
I’ll get into all that soon enough, but not today.  Today is Wednesday, after all, and it has always proven to be bad business to discuss anything controversial on Wednesdays.  So it will have to wait.  Besides, right now I have to go stalk an opossum that has been rather arrogantly rummaging through my trashcan for the last few weeks.  He is not foraging for food as much as he seems to be critiquing the contents of my garbage, and that is simply not acceptable.  I have to listen to a lot of nonsense in my life, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to take any shit off of some low-rent marsupial with poor orthodontia.

N.P.: “Rainbow Man 2.0” – Busy P