Slowly floating around the room with a will-power bordering on the hyperbolic, I want to be surrounded by people who are doing nothing with their lives.
Like your clothes, it is necessary to change your ideas from time to time.
It is fun to think like a fascist (is it only Mussolini, or was his a real philosophy?).
We should be against everything ever said or done. It's spring!
Race car drivers bother me. They go so fast, but are only going in circles.
Diogenes lived in a barrel. Alexander "the Great" said if he wasn't himself he would have liked to be Diogenes. Doing as little as possible with your life can be like conquering the world.
I should know more about the ins and outs of natural history.
I should dress up like a cat and try to improve my common sense.
Criminals are out, like daffodils. They sense the sun, and they need the green.
Phantom barbers in mobile homes drift through the desert.
Spring. A mathematical description of a spring. Its coiled intensities are as potentially energetic as Salvador Dali's moustache.
The mobile homes fan out like trikes on a playground heading for the national campgrounds.
Migrations of bison.
Rockettes kick at Radio City. I can't find my scissors.
The healthcare bill heads for reconciliation, while Dali pulls his moustache, and Obama flexes his long thin fingers, twirling his pen on his nose.
6 comments:
When my wife and I left the U.S. fifteen years ago for greener pastures overseas about half of my wife's paystubs for the previous fifteen years had been coming from an outfit called Puget Sound Neighborhood Health Centers. Her patients then were refugees from southeast Asia, central and south America, the horn of Africa, eastern Europe, disenfranchised black people, indigents and abused women. The primary care clinics in Seattle that were formerly part of that system are now called NeighborCare.
When I visit Seattle once or twice a year as I do now, because my wife and I each have a surviving octagenarian parent, one of the first stops I always make is the Northgate Mall. I used to have to go there to activate my T-Mobile account at a little kiosk staffed by someone from Turkey so I could use my cell phone. It was called something else before it became part of the T-Mobile network and the assumption then was that your first language was Spanish.
Northgate Mall is completely different than I remember it. White people now constitute a small minority of the shoppers and the young people working the tills. Twenty years ago it was a lily white residential community. Blacks, hispanics and immigrants from Asia and the Middle East stood out like sore thumbs. That's no longer the case.
The difference between a Check Medical Center and NeighborCare is that one of them has medical forms on hand written in eight different alphabets and a staff of translators who between them understand the basics of English medicalese in spoken languages that use those alphabets.
The people we knew twenty years ago were mostly people from lily white communities with advanced degrees in medical specialties who were interested in cross cultural medicine. Some of them are still working in that system, but in recent years I think they've felt more and more alienated from their jobs, not because so many of the patients they see were born in other countries, but because they chose their fields with an aim to provide health care for people who would not otherwise have been able to obtain it. I suspect that some of them feel that their expertise and services have been coopted or even wholly appropriated by insurance companies that are now their actual employers, companies whose bottom line depends on denying services to the very people my friends built their careers and reputations serving.
American exceptionalism is exceptional precisely because America is and always has been a melting pot. Immigrants from overseas make better citizens if they don't die on the hospital steps like Bessie Smith did.
The Bessie Smith story of having been refused entry into a whites only hospital is discredited, although of course it's a fun rumor for the left to keep alive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Smith
She was in two successive accidents, the first of which was probably enough to kill her, the second finished her off.
It's interesting to me that people want to come from all over the world to be in America. Why is this so?
It has to be because the laws are decent. It's the only thing that separates us from a place like the Congo.
And the laws are clearly derived from the ten commandments. If we let go of those, we will be the same as all the other toilet nations.
Or should I say nations without toilets. Two thirds of India's citizens have never used a toilet.
The combination of freedom of inquiry as instanced in Luther's declarations, such that science is free to investigate (within the parameters of the ten commandments, so that you can't have a Joseph Mengele operating on you while you're still alive just for the fun of it) is what makes this place function.
Multiculturalism confuses that issue.
Of course, the Christian legacy is that ultimately it would be a blessing for all nations, and for all peoples.
There is only one true God. All the others are false idols and demons.
I've never been able to understand the logic of automobile racing. Machines aren't dependable. How can you measure inanimate objects--even those "driven" by man--against each other? It's weirder than gambling.
The real participation only happens for the drivers themselves, who see what's happening on the ground. It's not really a spectator sport at all. The best auto races are cross country, which makes spectating an impossibility.
Racing in fast vehicles is kind of crazy, anyway. Anything you do sitting down--and that includes those Winter Olympic vehicle course events--is pretty silly, in the end.
Everything is silly.
I'm playing fantasy baseball.
I don't know anything about baseball, and don't care about it, but I play fantasy baseball.
This is silly, and obviously so.
But so is just about everything else, so it's good to do things obviously silly so we can let go of pretending that something we're doing is serious...
Everything's silly:
Like watching cars go in circles, or watching grown men play games, or going to coffee shops and listening to people read words they've written, or singing with a mostly-off-key congregation, or wrestling with a dog, or arguing with monks and monarchs and community college professors via the intertubes...
Giving birth might not be silly. And raising children is important.
But giving birth itself is at the least an Absurd event, and children themselves are the embodiment of silliness, I guess so that we don't take too seriously the only important thing in this world...
I'll just take this space to say that I like Sal much, much more than Rene.
I even wrote a poem to him.
A very good poem, GM.
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