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It never rains but it pours, they say, and when it rains it makes the little flowers grow, and when it pours it’s instant rainforest,  with growth growing on  growth and intertwining orgiastically, and that’s fine, that’s just beautiful, because life.

Usually I have a poetry reading a month and very often I don’t find I have anything performance  ready when the end of the month rolls around, and then the readings go dark for the summer.

Lately, though, there has been an explosion of readings, and I’m finding that that is pushing me to write, and I’ve just had two within a week and I’ve got two more coming up next week, and I’ve probably got enough fresh material for all of  them.

Tonight was the release of the latest edition  of “Word Addict’ magazine, in which I had a couple of  poems, so my contribution was pre-set, but I  did write one special for the occasion.  It’s an  arty bunch, and the reading was in a proper stone basement and they had a screen behind the readers, took me right back to the 60s, and the theme was ‘Blue’ and everybody who read had to be anointed in blue by the High Priestess of Blue, and Jarda, our host, performed in a fblue bathrobe, because he is a bit of an exhibitionist that way.

Some good, some bad, not a big crowd, it suddenly got much larger shortly after I’d finished my piece, which irritated me a bit, but I was satisfied with the quality of my performance and got ideas for a couple more poems and then when I got home there was a message informing me of another reading Thursday night, and than we leave  for American on Monday,j so I’m fitting in just as much poetry as I can handle.

It’s a jungle, a metaphorical jungle.

I am very tired of the good guys losing so many close elections.  In the USA, I was very disappointed with the election for the chairmanship of the state DNC, and I suspect fraud, and it is my understanding that so does Kimberly Ellis, and therefore the results are being challenged, which is good.  I though Rob Quist was going to pull of an upset in deep red big sky country, but it didn’t happen.  Now in England.

I know, I’ve got plenty of English friends on facebook telling me that this was actually a win, and I recognize that the British system is different from the American, but, nonetheless, it’s Theresa May whose forming the next government and not Jeremy Corbin, which is heartbreaking.

(as I understand it, since she doesn’t have a majority in parliament but just a plurality, she’s forced to form an alliance to even remain Prime Minister.   So, she’s formed that alliance with the DUP (the Mike Pence party) and it’s going to be horrible.)

Anyway, the closeness of, it seems, all elections around the world, makes me suspect that the big fix is in.  I mean, the planet is about 50/50 men and women, that’s logical.  But that people  should be so sharply divided ideologically is bizarre, statistically anomalous.  I don’t know whether it’s the Illuminati, the Masons, the Rothschild’s or the Bilderberg Group, but if it’s not some group like that I don’t know how to explain it.

Imagine a room with infinite doors.

No, wait.  Scratch that.  A room full  of infinite doors would need to be an infinite room and then you run into that paradox whereby there are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, an infinite number between 1 and 2, and so on, in fact an infinite number of infinities, and I don’t want this blog to be about math, or unsolvable problems.

Imagine an infinite number of doors.  They can be floating in  space for all I  care, they are metaphorical  doors.  Behind each one is a  different version of the future.  Behind one, Corbyn wins, behind another, May wins.  Behind one, windmills, behind another, lots of nuclear power plants, behind another, a world covered in oil spills and dead birds.  Behind one, she says yes.  Behind another, she says no.

It really would  be helpful if these doors were labeled, wouldn’t it?  It would be nice if we had enough information to know if we are entering one of the utopian futures, where everybody is listening to music and eating fruit salad and dancing in the meadow barefoot at sunset, or one where giant killer robots stalk the Earth and humans live in fear in abandoned parking garages.

Well, they are.  There  is  the old saying “He who has not studied history is condemned to repeat it,” but the flip side of that coin is true , too, that somebody  who has studied history and understands it well can, to some degree, predict the future.  Also, we have lots of truly smart people  on the planet who are well versed in science and technology and have a pretty good idea which ones can save us from starvation and which have the power to truly mess us up.

All of this knowledge exists, and it is the labels on the doors.  We just need to read before opening.  That’s a lot to  expect in a democracy, I know, but it’s how we can ensure a golden future.

I  use Facebook all  the  damned time but I  don’t really understand how it works.  The world is like that.  I use a mobile phone, but I  don’t understand how that works.  I use money, but economics makes no damned sense to me at all.

So, I guess it’s my problem.  Whatever.  I’m sure they could simplify things if  they wanted to.  If I was Mark Zuckerberg, I’d call in some my top geniuses and say “Here’s what we need to do.  As a public relations thing, we’re going to donate a bunch of computers to schools for the mentally handicapped.  But, before we do that, we need  to make sure they can operate them.  So, I want you to simplify everything, make it so even the biggest moron in the place (and remember, some of these people  can’t dress themselves) can  use it easily.

Then, when they had accomplished that goal, I would market the finished product to the general public.  Geezers  like  me would lap it up.

My beef right now, the thing that triggered this, is that I just wrote a clever , little poem (little is no exaggeration, a mere 4 liner) and posted it on Facebook.  Not without difficulties, I might add.  First, the “what’s on your mind” box disappeared and I had to go  out of Facebook and then back in.

Then, it broke up the lines badly, making it 6 lines instead of 4.  I  didn’t like that, didn’t think the lines were that long  at all, but decided to go with it and break them up a bit more, so there wouldn’t be a line  which  was one  dangling word, but at that point my color box option disappeared, and, even though I know that everybody  mocks that box, I wanted it.

Finally got it up and posted, but then it disappeared from the main screen right away.  It was on my timeline, but wouldn’t put it on the front page.  I  considered reposting, but one person  had liked it already, so I knew it was visible.

Basically, I have no idea who can see what, and I want everybody to be able to see everything.  Anyway, here’s the poem:

Whatever you read in the news today
just wait for a day or two

the odds are better than just O.K.

that it will be untrue

The day started O.K., and ended O.K., but there was  a lot of stress in the middle.  On the train out to Řež, most unpronounceable town in the inhabited universe, I got a poem written, a sweet little piece that I like quite a bit, about trees and how they grow outward, there is no introspection in nature,  and I liked the poem because it came to me pretty much all at once and I didn’t have to think about it.

Then my lessons at Řež went fairly well, because they always do.  Not all  the students are at the same level, but they are  all pleasant, co-operative adult students.  It’s an easy  hour and a half.

The trouble started on the way back to Prague.  The 10:53 was late and I looked up from doing a Sudoku puzzle and suddenly noticed that  there was nobody else on the platform.  That was odd.  It’s not a busy station, but there are usually 10-15 people or so.

The next train is at 11:23, which meant I’d have to skip my brunch stop  at McDonald’s in order to  get to my kids’ classes on time.  Then I saw the  notice.  My Czech is not perfect, but I got the gist, which was that the train was not coming.  By this time one other person had arrived, so I pointed  out the sign to her and she (being Czech) realized that we’d have to wait on the other side.

Northbound and Southbound trains had to alternate on  one track, I guess due to repairs or something.  Around the same time, I got a text saying the other teacher at the school was sick, so  her classes were going to be combined with mine.  Not a good day  to be late.

Well, we crossed to the other platform, the train did come, and I got there on time, so that was one problem down.  The combined classes were kind of wild, it was just too many children to control, so I tried games but, as was predictable, some students  were so  enthusiastic they were fighting with each other over whose turn it was, and the bad kids were just wandering around the room, looking for things to destroy.  In  the last group, who are 2nd graders, a couple of boys got into a tussle and knocked a table over and one of them went down, the bigger of the two actually.  No injuries, but it sure did disrupt the class for a couple of minutes.
It started raining on the way home, a good, solid rain that lasted for hours.  That was not stressful.   The stress was over.