The time is Y0, the Year 0. (Not really Y0, of course, as there had been fabulous human history for more before the so-called Year Zero than after.) Still to come is the Inquisition, the Crusades. The manifestly destined wrecking of the Native Americans North & South from sea to shining sea. The importation of human chattel as slaves from Africa. The on-going oppression of women as a subtler chattel, or cattle. A myriad of ultimately aimless named-slaughters and unnamed dismemberments and indentures. A myriad is ten thousand so 4.9875 Stupid Slaughters a year is about right. The singed shuddering stench of the electric chair. Ah the glory of mankind .. .. .    more »

I always remember Ho Chi Minh, the winning Vietnam general, saying, "We live here. We would have fought you for 300 years."    more »

Fugu is the expert filleting of the exceedingly poisonous Hypocrisy fish . . . The radical and aggressive treatment probably necessary for cheney viperiens extremos is emergency splenectomy. The metastasized spleen just has to be hacked out on the spot—at the bus stop (As if any of them would ever ride a bus!) or at the dinner party with the butter knife or at the humvee sales lot .. .. .. We need to explore with you students of comedy how people live in the aprèsWar world .. .. . .    more »

"One black candle" is how we spectrally wander the halls of our dismay with Dick the dick, the Inquisitor from Mordor who slouched toward Washington and was born again. One black candle with its obsidian flame; we have to learn to see in the dark .. ..    more »

One wonders at the gods nibbling truffles and sipping a fine hoppy IPA (India Pale Ale) as they giggle and quill the script we're fated to play out in this gigantic EarthSide SoapOpera out of which one may not opt. "Golly, Fat E," I cry, "Couldn't you write out Dick the dick for a nice solstice present?" Of course then I just get irritated that the xtians who are perfecting hypocrisy stole our nice raunchy and revelried unholy day first from the solstice and then our spring joliday too. Piffle. Rapture them up soonest .. ..   more »

I put on my overalls, bought a new bucket, and a few rolls of Select-a-Size Bounty paper towels for mopping up. My first job back was construction clean-up on a mansion. Holy Moly. Construction clean-up is three times harder than window washing because all of the razor-blading and super scrubbing. Painters, by the way, who say through their rovianally deceitful lying teeth that the overspray they have mangially managed to get on 90% of the windows inside and out “is water-based and washes right off.” No X 1000. But of course they are gone skulking and cackling off to the next job, leaving the hapless window washers to scrape and scrape, ever unable to get all the damn specks off. There are as many micro-specks of paint on an over-sprayed window as there are visible stars on a clear night. Just it ain’t poetical .. ..   more »

“Dalai’s meme is Dirty Politics, Dirty Religion, Dirty Science. It gives us a handy, mouse-soufflé-tasty way to comprehend the wrongness and the rightness – to see the ideas of politics, religion, and science through a prism with the light broken into its constituent parts. The ignorant excesses distort the possibly noble pursuits.”    more »

What a sweet night. Tuesday, November 15, 2005. A huge full moon floated in an indigo sky. The Mountain View CA City Council unanimously voted to lease light poles to Google to put up their synapse-devices to knowledge-cast the world’s information, the world’s eccentric and fascinating library, into people’s houses, apartments, schools, and parks .. .. .   more »

Standing ovations to Google for the farsighted gift of wifi to Mountain View. This is so smart and so urgently essential to a knowledge-enhanced future that I'm elated. Hurray and thank you! .. .. But -- in order to "make the world's information universally accessible and useful," we must collectively let the Other Shoe drop. We must get a cheap, tough laptop to every single Mountain View child K-12 so that all that knowledge brought by wifi can be received regardless of income. We must not have a digital divide, but rather a digital multiplication starting with the poorest children and rapidly expanding to all children .. ..   more »

Part of the point is to do as much art as you can and stay hinged. The temptation is to dali or bosch and pterodactyl into the paisley skies of a benign madness. .. .. One of the rottenest and stupidest things is that people have attached success in art to frilthy lucre. Pifffle. Start your damn art today and be awful at it in the beginning. Bloody persevere. Eventually you get better. I think everyone should have an art that no one will ever see so they can just putter happily making mudpies in it and not worry what the spouse or the neighbor or any bloody anybody will say . .. .    more »

In addition to being inherently cold, Karl Rove shared dna with a long bleak line of cold creatures which were anti-empaths. They invented the rack and burning people alive. They rose in the Dark Ages in the Inquisition, justified their atrocities in the Name of God and of protecting the world from sin and sinners. That strain of cunning and sickness went recessive in the dna until it exploded back on the scene in about 1950 in a batch of killers born on Earth in those years. Karl Rove’s birthday was 12/25/50 – an anti-christ indeed – in deed .. .. .    more »

The reason I like to use the allegorical essay rather than the strictly formal and putatively rational essay is that there is a part of the mind to which you as a reader get access if there are story elements. It engages all four quadrants of your brain and the collective unconscious. It?s a way of giving philosophy its juice and its irony back. .. .. I read linear essays with admiration, but I always feel like I need to have better posture when I read them. As if I were having tea with the Queen. .. .. I happen to have always had an inclination to the sort of Celti-sci-fi version of allegory because it makes an end-run around the reason I?ve never been so much of a devotee of post-Faulkner American Literature: neurosis. .. .. Pieces set in the semi-quasi-future obviate neurosis because they aren?t worming over one?s narcissistic melancholies with as confessional or thinly veiled confessional modes .. .. .    more »

Sometimes you've been so bleak that you conclude that there is too much tunnel and too little light. Then vicious and cunning Fate arranges a tryst so sweet and funny that you figure you will forgive her one more time for her unfathomable treacheries. .. ..Affinity is not on the Periodic Table of Elements .. ..   more »

“Well, Bill, next week starting Monday at 8am, we want you to teach five different seminars before 3pm.” .. .. “What!?” Bill expostulates, snorting like a startled stallion, “That’s absurd!” .. .. “Additionally,” you add, “each 58 minute seminar will have between 30-40 students, a different group each hour. Between most of the seminars, you will have no break whatsoever – one group will file in as the other files out.” .. .. .. “What?!” Bill’s eyes begin to bulge. A vein on his sweat-slicked forehead visibly pulses. “That’s absurd!”   more »

What BushCo & Ilk completely miss is that we win both allies and friends with spreading what you might call ‘practical love.’ Instead of multiplying vengeance, we would multiply affection. Train battalions of paramedics instead of soldiers – the same people, folks, the very same people. Train para-engineers instead of soldiers. The same recruits. The same team work, the same camaraderie. Minus the future nightmares that we bequeath to so many of them. We should use our massive strength (tho we’re owned by the Chinese banks & it’s hard to know when that bubble bursts?) to build for the downtrodden, champion the sick. The Earth is pleading for peace in broken people -- they are the runes, the hieroglyphs. You just have to have another tank -- and you let another sister go river blind? These things are connected. .. .. Is our legacy as America all this hell and hate? I don’t believe it. I believe that we can export engineering and education and medicine -- and movies and cruddy hamburgers . .. .    more »

So the Chinese are doing giga-green and SoKo is leading the unwired way. We have got to instantly get this nation to have universal hotspots – the whole damn nation, like the MoonShot. Why were we woken up by Sputnik and not by SoKo? This is an Emergency & it is not a Test. You should hear that noise of alarm This is an Emergency until you shout at your Representatives urgently and constantly. WiFi this Nation Now .. .. .    more »

The hope is to pry open your mind for the pearl of wisdoms and delights that you hide from yourself because you were brought up in a culture which never taught you about Dreaming in the way that it taught you about riding a bike or how to decipher these black squiggles on a page. Both worlds are actually your birthright ? an integration will make you happier, saner, and startlingly aware of your true equality in the cosmos. .. .. One of the immediate benefits of attending to your OtherLand experiences is the disappearing or radical diminishment of envy or feelings of deprivation. When you have such spectacular inner riches, you don?t fuss yourself about needing another Hummer. .. .. Another benefit is a quantum leap in humor. A pleasure in sloth and silliness. Below is a fierce confection for your Clown Mind .. .. .    more »

I gotta say that losing Roe v Wade means hacked-up young women, often self-mutilated. I personally can't imagine wisdom or vision overturning Roe v Wade. But then I'm a woman who lived thru the era of hacked-up young women -- friends of mine even. Not anecdotes, but first hand watching the blood pour onto the floor. I’ll never forget the smell of all that blood .. .. If people didn't have the money to get out of New Orleans with a monster hurricane bearing down, how do you expect a young woman to get to a state where abortion is legal? .. ..   more »