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 »

Writers are used to being in the hand of Fate. When you get your own voice for sure at last, it’s like being knighted. You never need doubt the holy voice again. Soon tho, you realize that you are really an amanuensis for Something Which Speaks. The Ego does not write. It receives, like a pagan communion, the elixir. You are alive in the runes, the 3D of your sentences as they unfurl, the sentiments into images, around you. It is the alchemy. .. .. But to trust this impulse in your own living story with its bank accounts and rain and culverts as well as the parrots’ feathers is nothing if not risky. It’s being risqué may well not make up for how risky it really is . .. .   more »

“Well,” said Profounder, “the young on Planet Paisley have watched the middle-aged and old capitulate to gigaGreed, gigaCreed, and methed theoMilitoPatriotism. Who stands up? Who hollers? Silence of the Sheep – Obedient Americans is the longest running reality show they’ve seen. Who needs the SS? Malls, mortgages, football, and petty political bickering on cable tv quell the masses just fine .. .. ...    more »

Friskily with a certain sychophance like a Golden Retriever puppy, Charlie Rose asks Mr. Photo, "You shot a portrait of our President when he was governor of Texas?" .. .. .. All the air went out of the room. The amusing flock of anecdotes all fell out of the sky like dead birds. There was a long silence, ghastly on TV. Mr. Photo's voice lost all its buttery over-&-undertones, and he said with flint, "He's a hard little man."   more »

Rosa Parks Dared. I grew up on a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the Fifties. There were the water fountains with 'Colored' & 'White.' The only place a traveling 'negro' family might rest their head along the several hundred miles on the Big Highway was down a dusty dirt road with a peeled and faded sign -- not even Dew Drop Inn, but only 'Colored.' What most folks not from those places or times cannot begin to imagine was how utterly brave 'just staying seated' was in those years. .. .. .. Also Weasel TV, improv with people off the street. .. .. What woeful oceanic inadequacy must a man feel who must have the ultimate codpiece vehicle, a Humvee? And eight of them, like Arnold? Welcome to Planet Asylum where the inmates clearly are running the whole hebang. Duck & cover .. .. .    more »

The Burning Child .. Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Instructional Complex. .. ..Child, child burning bright in the forests of delight. Every child has the civil right to a superb education. We shift the $820,000 per minute over to a Manhattan Project of funding to provide an explosion of education in our nation. .. .. .. Always look back from Y3000. Imagine where we are as our better angels in Y3000. How do we get there? That’s what pogblog wants to challenge and cajole you to think about. Not why we can’t. Because we do. So how do we get to the constructive, fruitful world? .. .. ..   more »

Lucid or elan or lively waking (& lucid or elan or lively dreaming, sooth said) is all a matter of deft attention. .. .. Attention is a substance. Attention can travel amongst the intersecting spheres of densities. Monsieur Einstein fussed about his e=mc2 which holds up pretty well in K1, the semi-standard shared steady or fairly predictable and persistent solidity. But attention -- the attention point can travel jaguar-like thru the forests of the night and of de-light. A=ec8 .. .. ..    more »

The gigantic & glorious & terrifying planetary changes of the next six years or so will be a lot more, well, fun for you if you both frantically and serenely gobble down the glamorous and nifty tricks, slick & delicate & brazen, of interweaving lucid waking & lucid dreaming, amigo, amiga. .. .. In the juggling integration of lucid waking & lucid dreaming, the leitmotif epistemological or practical trick is being deftly intent. The following tidbits give you a gist of what deft grokkedly means .. .. .    more »

Oh but Ace, I wanted to remark on the travails and trawoes of that creep Karl. If you don’t get him, we will. We just slap the Empathy SlashVolter into his brain and turn on the rerun of his life. Aw, it’s great. He feels everything the folks he villainized felt, but just slightly slowed down so the molecular drip of the shame and agony plays its full neuronic amplitude through his sullied synapses. No compartmentalizing here. Karl cannot partition off his lousehood in the full Quark Activation of the Empathy SlashVolter. The villainized get to download all their distilled dismay into his circuits. Fair is fair. He can’t run; he can’t hide. The Truth Dawg has got a perfect nose. And nothin’ is hid from the Record. Every gasp of joy and wonder is recorded on the Akashic Vinyl, and every putrid moment. Ole Karl has to re-eat his own vomit .. .. .    more »

Some day this times-juggling will be routine, it will be overt, not covert. Still, few enough will be expert at it, have the psychic circus athleticism, the mastery, the danceryness to careen or dervish, pirouette through the portals as they randomly appear. It requires a deft concentration & an hilarity of mind, the new spherical empirical, skidding, skating, scudding, there is rhyme in time, and season, but no reason .. .. .    more »

I wonder what will become of Karl, Dick the Dick, and their Slithery Ilk who indenture our countrymen to poverty and sign the order for weapons as if their pens didn’t write blood. How do they not hear the screams of the mutilated collateral damage at night?.. .. ..    more »

Here at 2:41am early Wednesday morning we don’t know what Mr. Fitz is going to do. The fate of the Pretty Planet is in unusual flux tonight under a Taurus full moon. Has hubris dented KarlBoy, the serial rapist of reputations? Going after people’s families is Karl’s lifelong ugly m.o. “Cross me and you really pay.” .. .. .. As we can’t we hear the astonishing furnaces of photosynthesis enchantingly alchemming sunlight into apples, we can't hear what plot Fat E is sending us from the future, though like the calm before the storm, we can feel that something this way comes .. .. ..    more »

In my experience of so many schools, they are afraid to have their kids' fingers in the socket of the universe. I know that kids have a right to a radiant, mischievous, surprising life and that such a life can be more or less sensible. .. .. Just like electrical engineering can be taught so you can get your house and town wired, radiance engineering can be taught so you can get your inner mansion lit. .. .. We use at best 10% of our on-board computer. Quantum Schools will shoot for 20%. Double the capacity to seamlessly handle experi-data -- the intoxication you mention as a foundational, steady state, the base rate, drunk without slurring or hangovers .. .. .    more »

"We have spent a lifetime perfecting our pernicious habits. If we could apply a modicum of that zeal and cunning to crafting positive addictions, we’d thrive, we’d soar, we’d gambol. .. .. .. Go on. Swallow radiance, guzzle radiance, snort radiance, shoot up radiance. Air should sear your soul; that you can breathe, that your eyes blink should shock you with glory and raw joy. Once pagan reverence has gotcha, once reverence is your modus operandi, once you’re hooked, you can just get on with living your life in a lively, passionate, sensible way. .. .. Once you get the balance point, you cannot unride the bicycle. Once you get the balance point, you cannot unswim. Once the black squiggles coalesce, crystallize, you cannot unread . .. .. .   more »