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There was kind of a huge crowd at the poetry reading tonight, standing room only  and I wound up standing through  about half of it.  Most of the crowd wasn’t there for the poetry, however, they kept coming into the place in groups of 6 or 7, and heading into one of the back rooms.  When I walked through there during intermission , to get to the secret room at the back, they were all  sitting around a table playing Jenga.
So, there was pretty much constant opening of doors, and chatter going on, and perhaps even some of the people  in the poetry  room weren’t all there for the poetry, they just couldn’t get a seat at the Jenga table, but we did have a crowd.
Nobody in particular knocked me out, but there were a couple of new girls, and I hope  they’ll  be coming back.

One big problem, one big criticism, and three or four of the readers did it, is the confusion between a poem and an editorial.  Especially when you use names, in a couple of years it will sound a lot less relevant.
Still, got a chance to plug my book and the girl sitting next to me asked my name so she could look it up, so that could be a positive development.

In a philosophical sense, we shouldn’t judge a particular idea, argument, or position based on the person who holds it, but we should judge the merit of the opinion itself.
In a very real world sense, it’s very difficult to listen to the ravings of gun nuts over the last month and a half and give any validity at all to any opinion they might hold, from now until the end of  time.
It’s not just that they love guns more than people.  There are people who love films, computer games, flowers, electric trains, and treehouses  more than other people.  There’s a difference between unsociable and anti-social, and society can adapt to a fairly high number of the first and even  a few of the latter, although maybe not if the  latter have guns.
It is not just that they are very determined supporters of an increasingly defenseless point of view, always willing to defend the stupidest of memes, to argue about minute points of gun terminology, to blithely get behind the most ridiculous arguments (“We should ban spoons, because they make people fat”).  You’ve got to admire their persistence, in a way.

But, when they start attacking people who’ve been the victims of gun violence themselves, they have crossed a line.  I am not just talking about the verbal onslaught, calling them everything from retards to traitors with plenty  of other slurs into the mix (This is not  one or two people.  This is thousands.)   That is crossing  one line, for sure.
I am talking about death threats.  Think about that.  Gun lovers are threatening to  shoot people for  objecting to the idea that crazy people should be able  to  buy  guns to shoot people because they are friends and relatives of people who have been recently killed by a crazy person by a gun.
It’s a Westboro Baptist Church level of  offensive but now we are talking about large numbers of people, coast to coast.
If you are a gun lover, you should be embarrassed by this, at the very least.  If you have taken part in it at all, you should seriously reconsider what it means to be human, because it’s obvious you haven’t given that enough thought.

I often moan about the lack of anything good on TV, but today I got very lucky  and saw four good films in a row, none of which I’d ever seen  before.  Just good, nothing I’d say anybody has to see, but intelligent and original, at least.  They had interesting characters with interesting conflicts, and none of them, except for the last one, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, depended on guns and explosions or special effects that much.  By that time I was in the mood for something less challenging anyway, and I can always watch  Arnold kicking the shit out of people and wisecracking about it.  He’s like a more thuggish James Bond.
The first one, called Nine, was about a famous  director, and he had a wife, and a super hot girlfriend (Penelope Cruz) and all sorts of hot starlets wanting to  sleep with him, but his wife wasn’t happy  about the whole  situation, and it had flashbacks to his childhood and a fantasy scene of  him in a hot tub with  the  pope, and song, because it was a musical.  In the end, a really  solid film about mid-life crisis with  plenty of glitz  and tits.
The second one  was a shift from dark to light.  Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, about a magic toy store.  Cute, and the ending was a bit lame, oh, look, the  magic is real.  But, it had interesting characters and the struggle between existing in reality and believing in magic was well-played.
The third one kind of surprised me.  Chaos Theory, which kind of veers between light-hearted comedy and a wrenching story of a guy who finds out, through a bizarre series of  events which leave you, at several  points, thinking the  film is going to go in a totally different  direction, that he is sterile and therefore his 7 year old daughter is  not his.  The  film could have ended 3 minutes earlier, though, and been  complete.  The whole 15 years later thing was completely unnecessary.

Then came the Schwarzenegger vehicle, I think it was called  The 6th Day, or something like that.  It was in the near future (one of my  favorite settings), and they used a lot of tech which is just over the horizon, and made it very  believable.  They thought  Arnold  was dead so they  cloned him, but then they had to kill the clone to cover it  up, and eventually the two Arnolds had to team up to  save his/their family.  Twice the Arnold.

Not many ideas for a blog tonight and it’s getting late, watching Conan the Barbarian, my latest thing for totally mindless entertainment, so here’s a little  poem I wrote today:

A poem can do many things
a poem can entertain
a good one can inspire you
or feed your needy brain
perhaps for provocation
truly, it’s your choice
For me, it’s just I like to hear
the sound of my own voice

because it was in response to a question on a poetry  site I’m on, the one that stresses feedback, about our reasons for writing poetry, and it doesn’t really say much about anything  important and I don’t think it’s very  good or  original so  I probably won’t post it anywhere else or put it in the next book.
I have noticed that my comments over there have been a bit on the sarcastic side, lately, and maybe that’s bleeding over into my other comments, too.  Still, it’s a  good place for me to post, partly because you  do sometimes get some feedback, although not much butt it’s better than nothing, and partly because there aren’t so many people as on the other poetry sites I’ve been to so I’m pretty  sure that most of the people  there are seeing most of my poems.
Maybe that’s because it’s a site that encourages feedback, and most people don’t want that.  Most people (it seems) just want nodding agreement and support.  That’s cool, too, and all.  Time and place, time and place.

I was just reading through a Reddit thread, that seemed interesting, I may give that platform a try.  Not because I’m worried about Facebook stealing all my data, just to have an extra platform.

I always feel a bit better after an unfriending.  It’s on  my list of accomplishments for the day, like cleaning up my hotmail or cleaning the rabbit’s cage (that does get done every day, but it’s not always me doing it) or writing a poem (I wrote two today which I was fairly pleased with, although they were short and I don’t have any evidence at all that anyone else took notice).
I don’t feel better before the unfriending.  In fact, I can agonize over it for whole minutes.  Is this person really so horrible they need to be cut?  So, I haven’t heard from them in 6 years – nonetheless, would it be rude?  I know  they’re deceased, but what if their friends notice I’ve deleted them, would that seem tacky?  Once it’s done, though, it’s done, and you don’t even need to think about it any more.

And the defriending today, it wasn’t even me who did it.  It was him.  So, zero guilt.  Of course, it was me that drove him to it.  Here’s the situation:  One of my pet peeves is people who post bogus memes.  Not so much the posting, because anybody can make a mistake.  But, once somebody calls you on your mistake, i.e. “No, dude, Jacob Rothschild does not have 9 trillion dollars, and that’s a picture of Montgomery Burns,” there is only one correct response, which is “Oh, sorry, my  bad.  I’ll take it down immediately.”  Or, just to take it down immediately, without any comment.  O.K., two possible correct responses.  But this guy did neither of those two things.  He said, “It’s a cute animal story, and I wish it were true.”
Well, I suppose I could have been more diplomatic, but basically I  gave him a bucket load of shit for polluting the stream of thought, creating static on  the channels of communication,  so he unfriended me.
He was very civil about it.  Sent me a private message, in correct English, saying “You may have a valid point, but your reaction  to my post shows that we’re not really on the same wavelength, and good luck to you in future and all that, but I’m cutting you.”
Which is fine.  He’ll continue on happily posting bullshit memes and I will never see another one of them.  At least not from him.
Progress.